I  111 

Inspired 
Millionai" 


r- 

LO 
O 

CD 


raid  Stanley  Lee 


INSPIRED 
MILLIONAIRES 

&n  interpretation  of  America 

BY 

GERALD  STANLEY  LEE 

EDITOR  OF"  MOUNT  TOM  "AND  AUTHOR  OF 

"THE  LOST  ART  OF  READING," 

"THE  VOICE  OF  THE 

MACHINES,"  ETC. 


MOUNT  TOM  PRESS 
NORTHAMPTON,  MASSACHUSETTS 


COPYRIGHT,  1908 

BY 
THE  MOUNT  TOM  PRESS 


ttlLIUKGV  LIBRARY 


Lit 


INSPIRED  MILLIONAIRES 

PART  ONE 

(Which  Says  They  are  Coming) 

I  Millionaires  and  Other  People 7 

II  Millionaires  and  Machines 23 

III  The  Library  Cure 26 

IV  Expectations 35 

V  Three  Men  to  Expect 46 

VI  Millionaire's  Turn  First,  Please 50 

PART  TWO 

(Which  Considers  Ways  and  Means) 

I  An  Arrangement  for  Being  Allowed  to  Think  61 

II  Superintendents  and  Ideas 69 

III  Unions  and  Ideas 79 

IV  The  Skilled  Labor  of  the  Poor 98 

V  The  Skilled  Labor  of  the  Rich 106 

PART  THREE 

(Which  is  Concerned  With  Signs  and  Tokens) 

I  The  Lack  of  Conveniences  for  Millionaires  .     .  113 
II  The  Millionaire  Who  Does  Not  Want  to   Be 

Lonely 141 

III  The  Millionaire  Who  Wants  to  Be  Happy    .     .  146 

IV  The  Millionaire  Who  is  as  Good  as  Anybody     .  152 
V  A  Million  Dollars  as  a  Profession 163 

VI  A  Million  Dollars  as  an  Art  Form : 

(1)  Surplus  and  Aristocracy 170 

(2)  The  Millionaire  and  His  Imagination      .  174 

(3)  Imagination  and  the  Higher  Selfishness  187 

(4)  Imagination  and  Monopoly 195 

(5)  The  Back-fire  of  Socialism 202 

(6)  More  Imagination  and   More  Monopoly  207 

(7)  Millionaires  Who  Invent  People      ...  216 
VII  How  Some  Money  Looks 228 

VIII  How  the  People  Show  Through 238 

IX  The  Still  Revolution 252 

X  Mr.   Carnegie   as  an    Experiment   Station   for 

Millionaires 256 

XI  On  Being  Too  Big  to  Do  Wrong 263 

XII  The  Next  Corner  of  the  World        276 

Epilogue 301 


TO  JENNETTE  LEE 

"  I  built  a  temple  for  my  spirit's  home; 

I  filled  it  with  myself—  and  it  was  fair. 
From  its  dream-pavement  to  its  dream-reared  dome 

No  spirit  but  my  own  existed  there. 
About  the  walls  I  wrought  with  doting  care 

Huge  fancies  alien  to  the  world  of  men, 
Vague  daubs  and  vast  of  youth  and  light  and  air 

Sublimely  isolated  in  my  spirit's  den, 
I  lived  and  toiled  and  dreamed  and  hoped  — 

And  then  —  and  then  — 


FIRE 

"And  Elijah  said  unto  the  people  :  Call  ye  on  the 
name  of  your  gods,  and  I  will  call  on  the  name  of  the 
Lord;  and  the  God  that  ansrvereth  by  fire ,  let  him  be 
God. '  And  all  the  people  answered  and  said,  '  It  is 
well  spoken.9  " 


Millionaires  and  Other  People 

It  seems  to  be  natural  for  all  of  us  to 
be  a  little  restless  about  our  millionaires. 
They  are  all  amateurs,  or  nearly  all  of 
them.  The  very  idea  of  millionaires  — 
mobs  of  them  at  least  —  is  new  in  the 
world.  They  do  not  know  how  to  do  it. 

There  are  probably  very  few  of  us  who 
can  keep,  very  long  at  a  time,  from  trying 
to  think  things  out  for  them  a  little.  The 
last  time  I  had  of  this  sort  I  wrote  out 
the  following: 

Rules  for  Millionaires 

First.     Be  a  monopolist. 

Second.  Get  your  monopoly  without 
being  mean,  that  is,  by  invention,  by  some 
sheer  overwhelming  service  to  mankind, 
by  saving  every  man  on  the  planet  several 
dollars  a  year. 

7 


inspired  Third.  Take  it  for  granted  that  if  you 

18  had  had  a  chance  to  make  the  rounds  of 
the  planet  and  talk  to  every  man  on  it 
beforehand,  and  ask  him  if  he  would  be 
willing,  in  case  you  saved  him  several  dol- 
lars a  year,  to  go  halves  with  you  on  what 
you  saved  for  him  —  take  it  for  granted 
that  he  would  say  yes. 

Fourth.  Pocket  the  money.  See  to  it 
that  you  are  able  to  keep  in  absolute  un- 
questioned control  throughout  the  world 
of  the  thing  you  have  thought  of  for  it. 
In  other  words  see  to  it  that  you  have  an 
opportunity  to  be  mean  if  you  want  to. 

Fifth.  Almost  anyone  could  be  mean. 
There  have  been  many  great  inventions 
among  men  before,  but  no  invention  any- 
one could  make  would  be  so  great  to  us 
now,  or  so  original,  that  not  being  mean 
with  it  would  not  seem  more  great  and 
more  original.  The  first  man  with  an  in- 
vention in  the  twentieth  century  who  will 
be  professional  with  it  —  act  like  a  gentle- 
man or  an  artist,  with  it,  who  will  dedicate 

8 


it  to  humanity  and  himself  together,  who  Millionaires 
will  keep  absolute  control  of  his  invention  ^ther  People 
in  order  to  make  it  creative  and  emanci- 
pating at  every  point  where  it  touches 
human  life,  who  will  scatter  the  oppor- 
tunity and  freedom  of  the  new  invention 
into  the  daily  lives  of  the  men  who  are 
making  it  in  the  factory,  and  the  daily 
lives  of  the  men  who  are  selling  it  in  the 
streets  —  in  other  words,  the  first  man  who 
will  civilize  an  entire  new  industry,  who 
will  present  this  barbaric  world  with  one 
industry  that  has  been  civilized  in  spite  of 
it,  and  that  keeps  on  being  civilized  in 
spite  of  it,  and  with  no  one  to  say  it  nay, 
will  be  the  greatest,  and  most  impressive, 
and  most  memorable  figure  in  mod- 
ern times.  Incidentally,  he  will  ac- 
complish one  other  purpose.  He  will 
make  having  a  great  fortune  one  of  the 
ideals  instead  of  one  of  the  diseases  of 
the  world.  He  will  make  being  a  million- 
aire more  religious  than  being  in  a  mon- 
astery, or  than  any  of  the  other  rather 

9   • 


inspired      religious-looking,  but  comparatively  easy 

Millionaires 


But  the  main  point  will  be  that  he  will 
have  done  something  practical  and  spirit- 
ually business-like  with  our  whole  modern 
manufacturing  world.  He  will  have  sug- 
gested, and  carried  out,  and  settled  the 
one  way  in  which  the  industries  of  the 
world  can  be  civilized,  viz,  one  new  im- 
perious invention  at  a  time,  controling  one 
new  original  world-wide  industry,  which 
says  how  it  shall  be  run  itself,  which  shall 
be  free  and  splendid,  protecting  the  lives 
that  have  been  yielded  up  to  it,  and  that 
belong  to  it,  establishing  factories  that  shall 
be  literally,  and  every  day,  engaged  in  the 
act  of  pouring  out  from  their  doors  upon 
the  life  of  the  world,  new  men  and  new 
things.  When  one  looks  up  to  the  fac- 
tory windows  one  shall  think  of  them  to- 
gether there,  the  men  and  the  things, 
making  and  being  made  together,  each 
after  their  kind. 

But  it  is  not  merely  because  he  will  be 


the  redeemer  of  industry  that  I  am  look-  Millionaires 
ing  forward  to  this  man.  I  am  looking  ^her  People 
forward  to  him  because  I  believe  in 
rich  men  and  I  cannot  longer  bear  to  see 
our  rich  men  humiliated  before  the  world. 
The  man  who  does  this  first,  who  uses  the 
wealth  that  has  come  to  him  from  his  cre- 
ative spirit,  to  liberate  the  same  creative 
spirit  in  others  will  be  looked  back  upon, 
I  believe,  as  the  Redeemer  of  Wealth. 
A  rich  young  man  some  two  thousand 
years  ago  in  one  of  the  smaller  Roman 
provinces  was  told  to  sell  all  his  goods  and 
feed  the  poor,  not  because  he  had  wealth 
but  because  he  did  not  seem  to  have  any 
creative  spirit  himself  to  put  with  wealth, 
and  he  did  not  know  how  to  use  wealth  to 
liberate  the  creative  spirit  in  others.  He 
was  told  to  sell  all  his  goods  and  feed  the 
poor,  because  it  was  obvious  that  any 
better,  or  less  shiftless,  or  easy-going 
course,  would  have  been  beyond  him.  He 
had  no  great  ideals  to  express  with  great 
riches,  or  great  beliefs,  or  energies,  or 


inspired       vision   of   opportunities.     Like   a   great 

Millionaires  .,  .   ,  i       i      -i 

many  other  men,  rich  or  poor,  he  had  a 
poor  helpless  neuter  soul.  He  did  not 
know  anything  in  particular  he  wanted  to 
do,  and  went  about  asking  people.  A 
millionaire  at  his  wits'  end  ought  not  to 
have  any  money,  and  he  was  told  so. 
Even  the  general  advice  of  Jesus  (which 
is  always  quoted  as  against  rich  jnen) 
was  against  the  rich  men  that  he  and 
the  people  about  him  knew.  Because  he 
gave  up  entirely,  apparently,  on  a  few 
crude,  provincial-minded  millionaires  in  a 
little  side-country  of  the  world,  before  a 
single  church  had  been  founded,  it  does 
not  follow  that  he  would  give  up  entirely 
on  millionaires  now,  after  two  thousand 
years  of  Christianity  has  had  a  chance  at 
them. 

It  would  not  be  hard  to  prove  that  the 
very  faults  of  the  great  world-gathered, 
world-wide  millionaires  we  are  producing 
to-day,  have  qualities  of  insight  and 
consideration,  and  responsibility,  that 


would  almost  do  to  have  made  a  whole  re-  Millionaires 
ligion  out  of,  for  one  of  those  old-fash- 
ioned,  hemmed-in,  narrow  millionaires 
that  were  being  produced  by  the  simple 
industrial  system  (with  hardly  a  machine 
in  it)  that  obtained  in  the  time  of  Christ  in 
Palestine. 

It  may  possibly  be  true  that  million- 
aires have  been  less  improved  by  Chris- 
tianity in  two  thousand  years  than  any 
other  class,  but  it  must  have  done  some- 
thing with  the  rich.  Even  the  Christian- 
ity-in-solution  in  the  world  would  have 
done  something  in  two  thousand  years. 
It  probably  took  a  meaner  man  to  be  rich 
then  than  it  does  now. 

A  man  was  rich  on  purpose  in  those 
days  and  for  its  own  sake,  and  as  things 
are  to-day,  what  with  the  discovery  of 
new  countries,  and  continents,  and  the 
discoveries  of  chemistry  and  geology,  and 
the  boundless  inventions  of  machinery, 
the  millionaires  we  have  now  are  million- 
aires that  could  not  have  been  helped. 
13 


inspired  They  are  a  new  kind  of  man  —  many  of 
8  them.  It  is  almost  as  if  a  new  sort  of 
human  nature  had  been  produced  — 
rolled  up  upon  us  by  the  sheer  develop- 
ment, and  fruitfulness,  and  heating  up, 
and  pouring  over,  and  expansion  of  the 
earth.  Great  elemental  forces  silently 
working  out  the  destiny  of  man,  have 
seized  these  men,  touched  their  eyes  with 
vision.  They  are  rich  by  revelations,  by 
habits  of  great  seeing  and  of  great  daring. 
They  are  idealists.  They  have  really 
used  their  souls  in  getting  their  success, 
their  mastery  over  matter,  and  it  is  by 
discovering  other  men's  souls,  and  pick- 
ing out  the  men  who  had  them,  and  gath- 
ering them  around  them,  that  the  suc- 
cess has  been  kept.  Many  of  them  are 
rich  by  some  mighty,  silent,  sudden  serv- 
ice they  have  done  to  a  whole  planet  at 
once.  They  have  not  had  time  to  lose 
their  souls.  There  is  a  sense  in  which 
they  might  be  called  The  Innocents  of 
Riches  —  some  of  them. 
14 


At  all  events,  I  cannot  help  believing  Millionaires 
we  have  come  to  the  point  at  last,  where,  Q^er  pe0pie 
with  two  thousand  years  of  The  New 
Testament  struggling  up  through  the 
human  spirit  it  is  time  for  men  to  begin  to 
believe  that  a  man  may  be  good  enough  to 
be  rich.  Times  have  changed.  It  is  com- 
ing to  pass,  even  before  our  eyes. 
The  very  children  can  look  up  and 
see  that  times  have  changed.  We  are 
going  to  have  more  rich  men  in  the  world, 
not  less.  What  with  the  introduction  of 
machines  and  of  sudden  inventions,  mil- 
lionaires cannot  be  helped.  We  might  as 
well  make  the  most  of  it.  For  every  new 
value  thrust  upon  the  world,  some  new 
man  is  going  to  be  obliged  to  be  rich 
whether  he  knows  how  or  not.  There  is  no 
telling  which  of  us  shall  be  chosen  next  — 
if  we  keep  thinking  of  things.  And 
every  man  must  be  ready.  The  world 
must  be  full  of  visions.  It  must  weld 
itself  great  faiths  for  the  rich.  I  drink 
daily  at  this  belief.  I  believe  that  the 
15 


inspired  next  Messiah  that  comes  to  the  world  is 
going  to  be  a  Messiah  for  Millionaires. 
I  believe  the  time  is  almost  at  hand  when 
he  will  come  to  us.  He  will  come  rather 
modestly,  perhaps,  and  he  will  be  a  silent, 
busy  man,  but  when  he  dies  and  every- 
body turns  his  way,  and  looks  a  minute, 
there  will  be  a  great  village  somewhere 
smoking  up  to  the  sky  blessing  him.  And 
slowly  when  they  look  at  him  everybody 
will  know,  and  slowly  everybody  will  be- 
gin to  believe,  that  being  a  rich  man  is  one 
of  the  greatest  and  most  honorable  of  all 
the  professions,  they  will  see  that  a  man 
can  be  rich  and  be  a  gentleman  with  his 
money  —  a  gentleman  down  to  his  last 
dollar  —  that  he  can  even  be  a  great  artist 
with  it.  The  greatest  of  them  —  those 
who  have  the  deepest  insight  with  money 
will  be  poets.  Their  money  will  go  sing- 
ing from  them  out  through  the  open  doors 
of  other  men's  lives.  Everyone  will  see 
then  that  holding  on  to  a  million  dollars 
and  doing  things  with  it  is  more  religious 

16 


than  giving  it  all  up  with  one  wave  of  Millionaires 
one's  hand,  and  merely  being  self -sacrific-  ^er  Peo  le 
ing  with  it.  Being  a  millionaire  will  con- 
tinue to  make  a  man  have  a  rather  worldly 
look,  perhaps,  but  if  a  man  believes  big 
things  with  a  million  dollars  and  expects 
them  of  himself  and  of  other  people,  he 
will  seem  to  us  in  the  twentieth  century  a 
religious  man,  and  he  will  seem  a  great 
deal  more  religious  to  us,  than  that  nobly- 
blinded,  glorious  old  hero  we  all  think  of 
first,  over  in  Yasnaya  Polynaya,  who  is 
sitting  out  the  remainder  of  his  days  in 
a  hair  shirt  and  blouse,  and  who  looks  so 
religious  to  us  now,  and  who  is  so  literal 
and  faithful,  and  so  like  the  New  Testa- 
ment (2,000  years  ago) ,  but  who  does  not 
believe  big  things  of  men  the  way  the 
New  Testament  does,  and  who  does  not 
believe  in  men  at  all  unless  they  are  very 
poor,  and  who  does  not  see  any  hope  for 
any  of  us,  either  in  our  religion  or  our 
art,  or  our  lives,  but  to  level  us  down  into 
Russian  peasants,  and  begin  over.  But 
17 


inspired      it  is  hard  to  believe  it  is  ever  going  to  sat- 

Millionaires   .    /,  1  «   ..,  ,.    . 

isiy  people  as  a  faith  or  a  religion,  to  ac- 
cept Tolstoi's  vision  for  the  world,  wipe 
away  four  thousand  years  with  a  sweep 
— temples,  orchestras,  libraries,  Michel 
Angelo,  Copernicus,  Shakespeare,  steam- 
ships, and  wireless  telegraph,  and  begin 
the  world  all  over  again,  stupidly,  and 
from  the  bottom  up  —  with  a  sediment 
of  Russian  peasants. 

Tolstoi  is  going  to  continue  to  be 
respected  as  a  genuine  and  noble  character, 
and  he  is  always  going  to  be  remembered, 
no  doubt,  as  a  morally  picturesque  man, 
a  sort  of  Laocoon,  but  he  is  not  going  to 
seem  to  people  fifty  or  sixty  years  from 
now,  particularly  religious,  or  in  the  spirit 
of  the  New  Testament.  The  incredible 
thing  about  the  New  Testament,  taken  as 
a  whole,  is  the  way  that  Jesus  had  of  ap- 
proaching men  —  the  rich  and  the  poor 
alike  —  and  making  them  believe  in  them- 
selves and  see  visions  for  their  own  lives. 
The  one  thing  of  all  others  that  Christ 

18 


did  with  people  was  to  make  them  believe  Millionaires 
in  themselves  and  in  one  another  more  than  ^her  People 
they  wanted  to.  He  set  twelve  men  at 
work  in  three  years  to  make  a  new  world. 
He  made  them  believe  they  could.  And  so 
they  did.  And  if  this  same  Christ  were 
to  come  into  that  new  world  to-day, 
who  is  there  who  can  really  doubt  that  he 
would  have  faith  and  daring  enough  to  con- 
ceive great  ideals  for  it,  and  for  the  men 
who  are  rich  in  it,  as  well  as  for  those  who 
are  poor?  It  is  impossible  not  to  believe 
that  he  would  see  several  things  that  rich 
men  could  do,  that  if  he  were  to  meet  a 
small  man  with  a  great  fortune  to-day,  in- 
stead of  scaling  the  man's  fortune  down 
until  it  was  as  small  as  the  man  he  would 
level  the  man  up  to  the  fortune,  to  the  vis- 
ion or  ideal  that  belongs  with  a  fortune. 
He  would  not  advocate  (as  we  have  taken 
it  for  granted  he  did  in  the  New  Testa- 
ment) throwing  away  the  man  and  the  for- 
tune both.  If  one  is  to  make  any  inference 
at  all  from  the  general  nature  of  his  utter- 
19 


inspired  ances,  and  his  attitude  toward  human 
nature,  as  to  what  he  would  do  with  a 
millionaire  now,  one  would  be  inclined  to 
say  that  the  first  thing  he  would  do,  prob- 
ably, would  be  to  distinguish  him  from 
the  other  millionaires.  He  would  be 
human.  He  would  not  believe  that  the 
world  was  going  to  be  saved  (like  the 
socialists)  by  dropping  off  over  the  edge 
of  the  planet  one  entire  class  of  men  in 
one  indistinguishable  mass.  If  a  world 
is  going  to  be  saved  at  all  it  is  going  to  be 
saved  by  the  men  who  see  things  first. 
If  some  of  these  men  who  see  things  first 
turn  out  to  be  millionaires,  we  will  need 
them  so  much  that  we  will  have  to  keep 
them  whether  they  are  rich  or  poor. 

These  men  who  see  things  first  —  the 
invention,  the  man  who  can  be  original 
with  his  mind,  who  can  think  of  some- 
thing that  all  the  world  will  want,  and  can 
found  a  new  industry  with  it,  and  the 
millionaire  —  the  man  who  can  be  original 
with  his  money,  who  will  buy  the  new  in- 


dustry  and  be  a  monopolist  with  it,  i.  e.,  Millionaires 
will  run  it  —  not  in  a  scared  helpless  way,  Q^er  People 
as  his  competitors  like,  but  as  he  likes  him- 
self, who  will  run  it  as  he  likes  in  behalf 
of  the  laborer,  in  behalf  of  the  inventor, 
and  in  behalf  of  the  public,  and  in  his  own 
behalf  in  such  a  way  that  everybody 
would  see  that  it  would  be  an  international 
disaster  for  him  to  give  it  up  — these  two 
men:  the  inventor  who  sees  things  first, 
and  the  millionaire  who  sees  things  first 
have  the  making  of  a  new  industrial  world 
between  them. 

The  new  industrial  world  is  coming  to 
us  one  new  free-born  industry  at  a  time. 

I  would  not  be  understood  to  mean  by 
all  this  that  I  am  placing  my  faith  in  in- 
spired millionaires  as  a  class.  But  I  do 
believe  that  the  next  great  thing  that  is 
going  to  happen  in  the  world  is  one  in- 
spired millionaire.  I  believe  that  one  will 
be  enough.  He  will  make  the  rest  un- 
happy. They  will  watch  him  really  liv- 
ing with  his  money,  and  doing  big,  inter- 

21 


inspired  esting  things  with  it,  and  they  will  feel 
bored. 

And  it  will  not  be  by  being  righteous, 
and  noble-looking  that  the  inspired  mil- 
lionaire will  appeal  to  other  millionaires, 
but  by  having  a  good  time.  He  is  going 
to  do  these  things  because  he  likes  them, 
quietly  and  all  in  the  day's  work  and  with- 
out being  a  model,  and  without  any  fine 
moralizing  flourishes,  in  a  plain  every- 
day business  man's  way,  as  a  matter  of 
course. 

This  is  what  he  will  be  like,  I  think, 
when  he  comes. 

One  will  be  enough. 


22 


II 

Millionaires  and  Machines 

IT  MIGHT  not  be  amiss  to  state  a 
particular    situation    and    what,    all 
things  considered,  an  inspired  millionaire 
would  do  in  it. 

Not  so  very  many  years  ago,  when  a 

certain  well-known  factory  in was 

being  run  like  many  others  nowadays,  on 
the  old-established  principle  of  taking 
men's  souls  and  minds  away  and  giving 
them  libraries,  a  man  who  was  known  as 
Long  John  about  the  factory,  and  who 
was  one  of  the  "  A  Machine "  men,  and 
who  had  more  of  a  soul  probably  than  any 
other  man  in  the  mill,  was  discharged  by 
the  Union  and  The  Firm  both  for  insubor- 
dination. The  "  A  Machine  "  Union  had 
two  hundred  and  seventy  men  in  it. 
Long  John  retaliated  by  saying  (1)  that 
in  two  years  there  wouldn't  be  any  A 


inspired  Machine.  (2)  that  there  wouldn't  be  any 
18  A  Machine  Union.  He  had  a  machine,  he 
said,  that  would  take  the  place  of  two  hun- 
dred and  seventy  men  and  forty-five  more. 
The  same  machine,  he  intimated,  would 
take  the  place  of  The  Firm.  "  The  Firm 

could  go ."  I  regret  to  say  that 

Long  John  said  that  the  firm  could  go  to 
the  same  place  he  said  The  Union  was 
going. 

The  result  was,  it  all  happened  or  nearly 
happened  as  stated.  The  new  machine 
was  invented.  The  A  Machine  men  were 
turned  out  all  through  the  country,  and 
there  was  nothing  else  they  knew  how  to 
do.  The  Firm  itself  was  only  saved  by 
buying  up  the  machine  from  Long  John 
at  revenge  prices  and  finally  by  making 
him  a  junior  member. 

The  first  thing  that  the  inspired  million- 
aire is  going  to  believe  in,  with  his  money, 
is  Long  Johns.  He  is  going  to  believe 
that  the  only  way  to  keep  ahead  in  modern 
manufacturing,  that  is,  in  manufacturing 


with  machines,  is  to  place  inventive  and  Millionaires 
interested  men  in  charge  of  the  machines.  Machines 
Other  things  being  equal  he  is  going  to 
believe  that  if  his  factory  has  the  most 
creative  men  in  it,  the  most  of  them  at  the 
most  points,  it  will  have  the  most  chance 
of  keeping  at  the  head  of  the  race.  He 
is  going  to  make  his  decisions  and  invest- 
ments, and  promotions,  and  appoint  his 
superintendents,  on  the  principle  that 
competition  in  manufacture  is  a  race  of 
machines.  The  less  he  allows  his  men  to 
be  like  the  machines  they  work  with,  the 
more  they  are  going  to  do  with  the  ma- 
chines he  already  has,  and  the  more  and 
better  machines  he  is  going  to  have  with 
which  to  hold  the  market. 


Ill 

The  Library  Cure 

I  WAS  talking  on  this  general  subject 
the  other  day  with  a  friendly  millionaire 
who  happens  to  be  the  chief  owner  of  a 
large  mill  which  is  not  a  thousand  miles 
from  Mount  Tom  and  which  we  will  call, 
for  the  sake  of  convenience,  the  Holbrook 
Mill.  I  had  been  trying  to  express  a  little 
my  ideas  about  machines  and  about  letting 
men  think  in  factories  and  had  just  been 
telling  him  about  the  career  of  Long  John 
—  and  I  had  told  who  Long  John 
was.  "  But  the  trouble  is,"  he  said,  "  you 
cannot  get  Long  Johns."  He  then  went 
on  to  say  that  according  to  his  experience, 
"  machinery  was  machinery  and  that  was 
all  there  was  to  it."  "  The  men  who  work 
with  machines  do  not  think  after  a  year  or 
so,"  he  said,  "  and  would  rather  not." 
He  rather  patronized  my  hopefulness,  I 
26 


thought.  I  listened  a  few  minutes  more,  The  Library 
while  he  heaped  up  difficulties,  and  then  " 
I  stepped  in  with  what  must  have  looked 
to  him,  as  a  practical  man,  a  sort  of  trip- 
ping literary  promptness.  I  said  that  it 
seemed  to  me  there  would  be  no  way  out 
for  our  machine-civilization  until  the 
owners  of  machines  had  ideals  for  their 
employees,  as  well  as  for  the  machines, 
and  made  it  a  point  to  improve  the  men 
and  the  machines  together. 

He  sniffed  a  little  when  I  spoke  of 
ideals  for  employees.  "  The  Holbrook 
Silk  Mill  has  them,"  he  said. 

Then  I  remembered  I  had  seen  the  Hol- 
brook Silk  Mill  once,  out  in  the  suburbs, 
its  little  Model  Village  all  around  it.  I 
remembered  a  long  day  I  had  spent  there 
tramping  about  with  a  reporter  from 
New  York.  It  was  true,  in  a  way,  that 
the  Firm  was  always  appearing  to  have 
ideals  —  at  all  events  it  always  appears 
to  be  trying  experiments  in  the  mill  and 
the  mill  village.  It  gives  dances  and  re- 
ay 


inspired  vivals  to  the  employees,  and  such  things, 
and  it  has  a  beautiful  little  library  in  the 
center  of  the  works,  green  grass  growing 
all  around,  ivy  at  the  windows  and  moss  on 
the  books. 

The  point  that  Mr.  immediately 

took  up  and  emphasized  was  the  moss  on 
the  books. 

I  said  I  thought  that  books  were  the 
foolish  end  of  the  ideal  to  begin  with. 
They  were  the  foolish  end  with  anybody, 
to  say  nothing  of  factory  hands.  And 
then,  as  I  was  trying  to  be  especially  rea- 
sonable with  a  practical  man  and  talk  facts 
and  not  theories,  I  brought  up  the  E.  S. 
Manufacturing  Company,  which  has  a 
huge  plant  in  one  of  those  wide  flat  towns 
one  sees  from  the  car  windows  in  the  mid- 
dle West.  The  mill  has,  no  one  knows 
how  many  acres  of  floors,  seven  big  chim- 
neys, and  a  small  library  —  books  in  same 
condition  as  above,  but  it  goes  one  step 
further  than  the  Holbrook  Silk  Mill.  The 
Firm  takes  the  ground  that  the  most 
28 


natural   way   to   rouse   men's   minds   to  The  Library 
other  men's  works  —  books  in  libraries  for    m 
instance  —  is  through  their  own  works, 
the  works  they  are  daily  engaged  in  them- 
selves.    So  the  Firm  publishes  its  own 
magazine,   offers  prizes  twelve  times  a 
year,  for  the  best  idea  of  the  month  that 
any  employee  may  have,  for  carrying  on 
the  business  or  any  part  of  the  business. 

"  Sounds  well,"  said  Mr. .  "  But  as 

regards  actual  ideas  for  the  works  and  as 
regards  the  actual  use  of  books  in  the 
library,  do  you  know  the  results?  " 

I  was  not  sure. 

"  I  know,"  he  said,  "  I  have  looked  it 
up." 

1.  No  ideas  for  the  works. 

2.  Moss  on  the  books. 

I  thought  I  would  not  bring  forward 
any  more  practical  illustrations  after  this. 
So  I  merely  talked  on  in  a  muffled,  hope- 
ful way  on  the  general  principle.  Finally 
I  said  that  the  failure  of  a  magazine 
did  not  prove  much.  It  did  not  prove  that 

^9 


inspired  men's  minds  were  not  interested  in  the 
8  work  of  other  men  through  the  work  they 
are  interested  in  themselves.  It  merely 
proved  that  they  were  not  interested  in 
the  work  they  were  doing  themselves. 
Why  should  they  be?  If  our  modern 
machinery  keeps  a  man  standing  before 
a  lever  all  his  days,  if  he  is  not  allowed  to 
do  anything  with  his  mind  but  put  his 
hand  from  left  to  right  with  it  for  fifteen 
or  twenty  years,  why  should  his  mind  be 
interested  in  anything  whatever  —  least 
of  all,  why  should  it  be  interested  in 
his  work?  Why  should  it  be  interested  in 
itself?  If  a  man  cannot  use  his  mind, 
the  most  intelligent  thing  he  can  do  with 
it  is  to  drop  it.  He  becomes  a  motor  for 
running  a  hand  from  left  to  right.  If 
improved  machinery  required  him  to  run 
his  hand  from  right  to  left,  he  would  be 
thrown  out  of  employment.  To  have 
tried  the  Library  Cure  on  men,  in  condi- 
tions like  these  we  are  confronting  now, 
and  to  have  found  that  it  failed,  does  not 
3o 


\ 


prove  that  ideals  for  employees  are  not  The  Library 
practicable.  It  merely  proves  that  the  C 
man  with  a  mere  modern  left-to-right  or 
right-to-left  factory  mind  can  no  more 
be  interested  in  a  library  than  a  Cog 
Wheel.  Even  the  Firm  Magazine  does 
not  interest  him.  Being  interested  — 
such  a  man  is  not  long  in  learning  —  is 
out  of  date.  The  sooner  he  gets  over  any 
latent  idea  of  being  interested,  if  he  has 
to  work  with  a  machine,  the  better.  The 
more  he  and  his  machine  are  alike  the  more 
happily  they  get  on  together. 

This  is  what  the  Man  with  the  Machine, 
judged  by  his  actions  at  least,  thinks  that 
he  thinks  —  namely,  that  he  does  not 
need  to  think.  And  this  is  what  his  em- 
ployer thinks  apparently.  "  Machines 
are  machines,"  he  says,  crossing  his  legs 
before  his  three-thousand-dollar  fireplace, 
"  and  that  is  all  there  is  to  it." 

In  the  meantime  the  moss  on  the  books, 
the  saloon,  the  more  stupid  strike  (from 
this  man  who  does  not  think) ,  the  bribery 
31 


inspired       question,  the  tenement  question,  the  cock 
88  fight,  the  political  boss,  the  walking  dele- 
gate, and  the  other  things,  ad  infinitum. 

All  that  society  can  do  with  the  Library 
Cure  is  to  open  the  wound.  The  thing 
that  a  man  does  his  knowing  with  and  his 
real  reading  with,  is  his  life.  The  only 
thorough  way  to  act  on  his  reading  is  to 
act  on  his  life.  And  the  only  thorough 
way  to  act  on  his  life,  is  to  act  on  the 
center  and  core  of  it,  on  eight  hours  a  day 
of  it  —  the  habit  of  mind  in  which  he  does 
his  daily  work.  A  man  knows  as  much 
generally  as  his  habit  of  mind  in  his  daily 
work  will  let  him  know. 

When  factory  work  is  so  arranged  that 
the  only  habit  of  mind  a  man  can  have 
in  a  factory  is  the  habit  of  not  having  any 
mind,  the  question  a  machine  civilization 
is  obliged  to  face,  is,  What  can  be  done  for 
a  man  that  is  in  the  habit  of  not  having 
any  mind?  What  can  be  done  for  mil- 
lions of  such  men  with  whom  we  are  obliged 
to  live,  and  vote,  and  worship,  which 

3* 


shall  be  consistent  and  thorough?  A  The  Library 
great  factory  which  takes  a  man's  soul 
away  from  him,  and  then  presents  him 
with  a  library  is  not  thorough.  Neither 
is  it  consistent.  It  should  take  away  the 
library.  All  that  a  library  can  do  for 
such  a  man  is  to  remind  him  of  the  rest 
of  him  which  has  been  taken  away. 

But  can  a  great  factory  help  taking  a 
man's  soul  away?  Factories  must  do 
their  work  with  machinery.  Machinery 
is  not  going  to  be  uninvented,  or  moved 
off  the  world,  and  machinery  makes  men 
like  itself.  Machinery  involves  minute 
subdivisions  of  labor.  Subdivision  of 
labor  means  subdivision  of  the  laborer. 
Can  it  be  said  with  truth  of  our  present 
civilization,  that  Mr.  Andrew  Carnegie, 
who  (like  the  rest  of  us)  has  been  taking 
men's  souls  away,  and  giving  them  paper 
books  instead,  is  doing  as  well  as  any  man 
can  be  expected  to  do,  who  does  anything 
at  all  in  an  age  of  machines? 

Thus  we  are  brought  face  to  face  with 

33 


inspired  the  full  breadth  of  the  entire  question  of 
s  modern  civilization  with  which  we  all 
must  reckon  sooner  or  later.  It  is  a  ma- 
chine-civilization. Can  men  who  live  in  a 
machine-civilization,  a  civilization  in  which 
men  are  obliged  to  earn  their  money  with 
machines,  in  which  they  cannot  even  spend 
it  without  machines  —  have  souls? 


34 


IV 

Expectations 

IN  TRYING  to  answer  the  question, 
"  Can  men  who  work  with  machines 
have  souls  ? "  it  is  only  fair  to  say  that 
this  is  not  a  work  on  political  economy  or 
industrial  science,  and  that  it  has  been 
written  on  the  assumption  that  the  ques- 
tion of  human  labor  is  one  that  belongs  to 
the  arts  and  the  humanities  and  not  merely 
to  the  sciences. 

Perhaps  nothing  —  not  even  a  clod  of 
earth  —  belongs  merely  to  the  sciences. 

Our  present  grave  industrial  problem, 
the  problem  of  how  men  who  work  with  ma- 
chines can  have  souls,  and  of  how  we  can 
get  the  men  who  own  the  machines  to  let 
them,  while  it  has  its  scientific  aspects,  is 
more,  after  all,  a  problem  of  human  char- 
acter, a  study  of  human  motives,  and  of 
the  powers  of  men,  of  psychology,  intu- 

35 


inspired       ition,    conscience,    of    worship,    and    of 

Millionaires       i_    .    •      ,  i       i  n 

what  in  the  long  run  men  really  want  in 
this  world,  and  are  going  to  get,  and  of 
what  really  makes  men  happy.  Indus- 
trial science  does  not  claim  to  be  expert  in 
divining  human  nature,  and  is  preoccu- 
pied with  the  laws  and  principles  them- 
selves more  than  with  what  the  men —  just 
around  the  next  corner  of  the  world,  are 
going  to  choose  to  do  with  them. 

Such  a  book  as  I  have  in  mind,  a  world- 
divining  book,  might  be  written  by  a  man 
who  has  more  the  equipment  of  the  novel- 
ist than  the  scientist  —  a  novelist  who 
does  not  write  novels  but  who  is  wise  and 
true  about  people,  or  perhaps  it  will 
be  written  when  it  comes  by  some  big  play- 
wright in  the  human  spirit  like  Shake- 
speare who  reaches  under  desire,  and  who 
sees  and  controls  the  motive  energies  of 
men. 

It  is  in  the  spirit  and  the  hope  that  a  book 
like  this  is  going  to  be  written  sometime, 
that  this  one  has  been  written  toward  it. 
36 


The  scientific  men  of  to-day,  as  I  under-  Expectations 
stand  them,  are  not  averse  to  letting  in  a 
work  of  human  appeal,  a  work  of  art  or  of 
action  in  their  own  field,  or  even  a  work 
of  the  imagination,  and  if  the  imagi- 
nation in  it,  is  true  or  in  the  right  direction, 
they  will  be  the  first  to  welcome  it.  It  is 
not  literary  for  the  literary  men  to  crowd 
out  the  scientific  man  from  his  influence 
on  the  arts,  and  it  is  not  scientific  to  crowd 
out  literature  and  the  method  and  appeal 
of  literature  from  science.  It  is  what 
literature  really  is  or  should  be  seeking 
to  be  to-day  —  a  kind  of  glorified  applied 
science.  Chemistry  is  not  the  physician. 
Biology  is  not  the  mother  of  society,  and 
political  economy  is  not  the  dynamo  of 
business,  and  what  this  country  needs  next 
in  the  way  of  books  on  this  subject  is  not 
more  maps,  charts,  or  systems,  more  net- 
work —  vast  trolleys  of  theories  over  our 
heads,  but  some  central  powerhouse 
of  thought,  of  faith,  and  of  turn- 
ing on  the  wills  of  men.  Perhaps 

37 


inspired  it  is  because  we  have  considered  the 
emotions  that  go  with  this  subject  and 
the  ideas  that  go  with  it,  apart,  that  we 
have  been  so  helpless  in  dealing  with  it. 
Perhaps  it  is  because  our  emotions  have 
not  been  fertilized  or  allowed  to  have 
their  pollen  on  them,  that  they  have 
been  planted  merely  in  libraries  and 
have  never  come  up.  Only  some  man 
with  the  double  equipment  for  it,  who 
works  in  the  spirit  of  a  Henry  George,  and 
writes  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  human 
being  and  a  scientist  at  once,  some 
man  whose  heart  reasons  and  whose  rea- 
son burns,  can  write  the  book  at  last  that 
shall  search  the  hearts  of  the  people  and 
turn  the  wheels  of  events. 

In  the  meantime  the  people,  until  their 
hearts  have  been  searched  and  lighted  and 
the  power  turned  on,  are  on  trial  before  the 
older  and  the  weary  nations,  and  before 
the  kings  and  cynics  of  the  earth.  In  the 
meantime  we  are  living  in  a  country  where 
every  class  of  men,  where  every  industry, 
38 


is  fighting  against  itself,  where  every  vil-  Expectations 
lage  and  nearly  every  factory  is  in  a  state 
of  civil  war,  a  country  governed  by  the 
people  and  for  the  people,  where  the  peo- 
ple are  grinding  up  their  souls  in  iron  and 
in  cogs  and  wheels  (in  machines  called 
machines),  where  people  are  lying  and 
stealing  in  machines  (called  trusts),  and 
killing  to  get  enough  to  eat,  and  where  all 
men  are  asking  "  Can  men  who  live  with 
machines  have  souls  ?  " 

Perhaps  it  is  just  as  well  that  every 
book  on  this  subject  should  not  be  purely 
scientific.  Perhaps  there  is  nothing  sup- 
erficial or  unworthy  in  strong  feeling,  or 
in  hope  or  fear  or  despair,  or  in  breaking 
through  to  the  truth,  or  even  in  a  little 
singing,  in  discussing  the  fate  of  a  great 
and  proud  people  among  the  nations  of 
the  earth. 

And  so, gentle  reader,!  have  come  to  the 
conclusion,  timidly,  and  after  butting  a 
rather  foolish  and  experimental  pair  of 
brains  against  several  high  walls  of 

39 


inspired  books  on  the  subject,  that  in  all 
8  of  its  practical  and  even  the  theo- 
retical and  intellectual  phases,  the 
labor  of  a  world  is  essentially  a  human 
or  spiritual  subject,  that  the  knowledge 
of  human  nature,  of  the  laws  of  the 
human  spirit  is  the  knowledge  that  has 
the  most  masterful  bearing  on  it,  that  the 
great  human  insights,  the  eternal  passions, 
the  great  faiths  of  the  human  soul,  are 
the  energies  that  are  finally  going  to 
count  in  the  great  practical  and  industrial 
problem  that  is  growing  to-day  out  of  the 
presence  of  the  machine  in  modern  life. 

And  so  I  have  claimed  the  question  for 
my  question  and  for  every  man's,  and  it 
is  only  by  its  being  every  man's  question 
—  a  human  question  —  that  it  can  be 
settled.  "  Can  men  who  work  with  ma- 
chines have  souls? " 

The   socialists   seem  to  have  an  idea 

that    somebody    is    going    to    think    of 

something,    some    industrial    contrivance 

or  machine  for  morality,  which  will  be  set 

4o 


up,  and  which  will  make  it  possible  for  Expectations 
men  in  a  machine-age  to  have  souls,  if 
they  want  them.  But  I  have  come  to  be- 
lieve that  it  is  not  by  any  economic  scheme, 
or  social  device,  some  way  of  inventing 
evil  off  the  earth,  but  by  great  personal  be- 
liefs, that  the  battle  for  the  existence  of 
the  soul  in  an  age  of  machines  will  have  to 
be  fought.  If  it  is  true  that  these  great, 
splendid,  blind  machines  are  crowding  me, 
and  crowding  my  brother,  and  even 
crowding  a  God,  from  off  the  earth,  there 
can  be  but  one  reason  for  it,  and  that  is 
that  my  brother  has  been  so  busy  in  mak- 
ing bigger  and  bigger  machines  every 
year  that  he  has  forgotten  to  make  big- 
ger men  to  go  with  them,  and  bigger  be- 
liefs to  make  bigger  men  out  of.  What 
he  is  going  to  do  next,  is  to  build  him  great 
creeds  to  go  with  his  great  machines,  and 
great  men  that  shall  be  built  out  of  his 
great  creeds. 

The  world  as  originally  planned,  was 
planned  to  have  men  in  it,  and  any  mod- 
41 


inspired       em  contrivance  that  is  being  rigged  up 

Millionaires  ••  /,  „        ,...      , 

by  professors  of  political  economy  in  the 
first  breathless  minutes  of  the  twentieth 
century,  to  make  a  world  all  of  a  sudden 
which  is  going  to  work  as  well  whether 
there  are  men  in  it  or  not,  or  whether  the 
men  in  it  are  trying  to  be  men  or  not,  will 
have  to  be  complex.  An  industrial  sys- 
tem which  is  based  on  nobody's  expecting 
anything  of  anybody,  or  upon  expect- 
ing as  little  as  possible,  has  to  be  elaborate 
because  it  is  not  true.  Lying  is  always 
elaborate  and  everything  that  goes  with 
it.  There  is  no  denying  the  value  of  the 
economic  expert.  If  we  have  chosen  an 
economic  system  in  which  we  are  going 
to  lie,  the  more  specialists  and  libraries 
it  is  going  to  take  to  help  us  do  it. 

In  the  meantime  everybody  really 
knows  that  in  the  last  resort,  if  we  are 
going  to  have  a  real  economics  —  an 
economics  that  can  save  a  real  world  —  it 
will  not  be  an  economics  that  only  a  special- 
ist can  understand.  The  truths  that 

4* 


strike  down  to  the  bottom  of  the  matter  Expectations 
are  all  human  and  elemental.  The  actual 
situation,  instead  of  being  elaborate,  is 
standing  out  at  this  moment,  when  one 
thinks  of  it,  with  a  terrible,  naive  sim- 
plicity across  the  whole  broad  front  of 
modern  life. 

The  whole  industrial  problem  of  our 
modern  mechanical  age  is  an  essentially 
religious  problem,  the  problem  of  getting 
a  few  millionaires,  or  industrial  leaders 
in  this  world  to  believe  in  the  men. 
Modern  industry  is  getting  more  com- 
plex, requires  more  and  more  an  expert 
to  mention  the  matter,  because  it  is  an  in- 
dustry which  is  trying  to  get  on  more  and 
more,  without  employers  and  without  em- 
ployees who  trust  each  other,  and  who  can 
afford  to.  The  center  of  an  industrial 
situation  is  its  organic  belief  or  its  organic 
disbelief  in  human  nature. 

The  first  man,  whether  he  is  a  man  of 
thought,  or  a  man  of  action,  who  shall  do 
something  or  say  something  that  shall 

43 


inspired       make  people  quite  generally  see  that  be- 

Millionaires   ,.       .          .       ,  ,  , 

heving  in  human  nature  can  be  made  to 
pay  —  will  settle  the  situation.  It  is  an 
act  of  insight,  the  fixing  of  the  real  or 
live  belief  of  men  of  action,  that  is  going 
to  bring  order  out  of  chaos  in  our  modern 
life.  What  shall  we  have  for  our  work- 
ing belief,  for  instance  with  regard  to 
capital?  Shall  we  believe  that  nothing 
good  can  be  expected  of  a  man  with  a 
million  dollars  and  kill  our  millionaires 
off?  Or  shall  we  believe  that  we  are 
going  to  produce  and  are  already  pro- 
ducing men  who  will  be  good  enough  and 
who  will  know  enough  to  have  a  million 
dollars?  The  moment  men's  creeds  or 
gospels  of  action  are  determined,  all  the 
other  aspects  fall  into  line.  What  shall 
we  believe  with  regard  to  labor?  Shall 
we  believe  that  the  way  out  in  the  labor 
problem  is  for  every  man  to  have  a  be- 
lief in  labor  —  a  belief  that  doing  five- 
dollar  work  pays  whether  one  gets  the 
five  dollars  or  not?  Or  shall  we  believe 


that  the  way  out  in  the  labor  problem  is  Expectations 
not  a  belief  in  labor,  but  a  belief  in  wages, 
—  in  not  doing  five-dollar  work  until  one 
has  the  five  dollars? 

It  would  be  hard  to  mention  a  single 
point  in  our  present  industrial  life,  which 
is  not  being  settled  or  cannot  be  settled 
by  what  men  believe  or  fail  to  believe 
about  themselves  or  about  one  another. 


45 


Three  Men  to  Expect 

THE  best  way  to  prophesy  the 
course  of  the  next  few  hun- 
dred years  would  be  to  pick  out  the 
three  hardest  men  to  believe  in,  in 
this  modern  world  —  the  three  particular 
kinds  of  men  this  modern  world  has 
stopped  expecting  —  and  believe  in  them 
and  expect  them.  I  have  no  special  theory 
or  program,  or  device  that  I  propose  to 
hang  out  —  flutter  like  a  handkerchief  in 
the  face  of  the  most  appalling  cataclysm 
of  elemental  forces  that  this  world  has  ever 
seen,  now  gathering  upon  us ;  but  I  have 
three  great  beliefs  which  I  believe  are 
being  silently  and  irrevocably  written  to- 
day, in  sleep  and  in  waking,  upon  the 
hearts  of  the  strong  through  all  the  earth. 
These  three  great  faiths  are  three  men. 
I  have  made  these  three  men  my  creed.  I 
46 


believe  in  the  inspired  millionaire,  I  be-  Three  Men 
lieve  in  the  inspired  laborer,  and  I  believe 
in  the  poet  or  world-singer,  who  shall  con- 
ceive, and  reveal,  and  inspire  these  men 
out  of  the  men  we  know  about  us,  who 
shall  forge  out  the  great  faiths  for  them, 
the  faiths  that  alone  can  glow  through 
and  melt  down  and  build  up  a  world. 

The  man  who  has  the  situation  most 
immediately  in  his  hands  —  if  he  is  going 
to  do  any  believing  —  is  the  inspired 
millionaire.  He  has  the  advantage  of 
position.  More  people  notice  him.  The 
moment  one  exists,  people  will  believe  in 
him,  and  inspired  and  believing  labor  will 
gather  about  him.  Instead  of  trying  to 
run  an  industrial  world  on  the  cash-reg- 
ister, fare-recorder  principle,  in  which 
men  will  not  need  to  believe  in  themselves 
or  in  one  another,  he  is  going  to  start  a 
fashion  of  making  and  invoking  men  — 
men  in  whom  nobody  can  help  believing. 
A  few  sample  millionaires  made  out  of  a 
few  great  sample  beliefs  in  human  nature, 

47 


inspired       judiciously  placed  about  in  this  modern 

Millionaires  ,  j  ,  ,          ,  .  _ 

world,  would  make  it  over  in  a  few  min- 
utes —  that  is,  for  all  practical  purposes. 
They  would  make  everybody  believe  that 
it  was  going  to  be  made  over,  and  make 
everybody  see  that  it  was  belief  that  was 
going  to  do  it,  and  the  start  would  be 
made. 

This  modern  world  in  its  great  crisis, 
with  its  new  machines,  is  at  the  parting 
of  the  ways.  There  are  two  courses  we 
can  take ;  the  course  of  arranging  a  world 
so  that  men  will  not  be  necessary,  because 
they  cannot  be  expected,  and  the  course  of 
arranging  it  so  that  they  will  have  to  be 
expected.  Some  of  us  believe  that  the 
more  inconvenient  it  is  made  for  a  world 
not  to  have  men  in  it,  the  better.  We  be- 
lieve that  the  way  out  for  us  modern  men, 
struggling  with  these  huge  machines,  is 
not  to  creep  back  from  our  souls  into  the 
machines,  but  to  come  out  and  face  the 
machines  and  lift  ourselves  to  the 
machines,  loom  up  with  our  souls  beside 


them  and  be  men  with  them.     So  we  face  Three  Men 
the  issue.     It  is  the  final  chaUenge  of  toExpect 
Matter,     live,     terrible,     steel-fingered, 
boiler-souled,    to    the    manhood    of    the 
earth. 


49 


VI 

Millionaire's  Turn  First,,  Please 

WHEN  the  inspired  millionaire 
comes  to  the  conclusion  that  it 
pays  to  have  men  who  can  think,  with  his 
machines,  and  begins  scouring  the  world 
for  Long  Johns  and  looking  about 
under  the  machines  for  them,  the  first 
thing  that  happens  is — as  has  already  been 
intimated  —  that  he  cannot  find  them.. 
He  finds  himself  growing  a  little  con- 
temptuous and  tyrannical  towards  all 
these  men  who  work  with  machines  and 
would  rather  not  think.  He  falls  into  a 
naive,  disgusted  surprise.  Now,  that  (all 
in  a  moment)  he  has  decided  that  all  these 
men  with  his  machines  can  think  —  wEy 
do  they  not  begin  to  do  it?  Gradually,  as 
he  thinks  more  and  more  himself,  his 
mood  changes.  He  finds  himself  won- 
dering at  the  men  a  little,  —  that  they  are 
50 


not  worse  than  they  are.     Then  he  begins  Millionaire's 
to  wonder  about  himself  and  about  his  m ' 

class.  Slowly  there  falls  a  kind  of 
fumbling,  wavering  humbleness  upon 
him.  As  he  walks  back  and  forth 
through  his  factory  —  this  vision  of  faces 
clacking  in  and  out  among  machines  — 
why  is  it  that  they  do  not  want  to  think? 
Why  is  it  that  he  cannot  get  Long  Johns? 
Will  there  be  more  Long  Johns  or  fewer 
in  twenty  years,  with  whom  his  sons  can 
carry  on  the  business? 

Belonging  to  the  millionaire  class,  and 
being  a  millionaire  because  he  has  time  or 
power  to  think  out  the  future  and  past 
in  business  more  than  others,  the  next 
experience  he  has,  probably,  is  the  sense 
that  he  has  been  personally  abused,  that 
the  employers  who  have  gone  before  him 
have  left  nothing  but  these  herds  of 
machines  to  run  machines  with.  They 
have  killed  off  the  Long  Johns.  They 
have  struck  at  the  roots  of  the  business. 
All  he  seems  to  see  before  him  is  a  great 
51 


inspired  human  gap,  for  thirty  years,  a  whole  gen- 
eration of  men  that  has  been  swept  out  of 
reach.  Long  Johns  are  not  to  be  had. 
They  were  to  be  had  once;  and  instead, 
there  is  this  huge,  hungry,  unreasoning 
drove  of  mongrels,  half -machines,  half- 
men,  staring  one  forever  in  the  face. 

Then  the  inspired  millionaire  falls  to 
thinking  what  it  is,  that  all  this  time  has 
been  happening  to  the  world. 

It  comes  to  something  like  this.  The 
rich  man,  who  has  always,  from  the  first, 
possessed  the  ground  and  the  holes  under 
the  ground  (the  two  things  from  which 
leisure  and  thought  can  be  dug) ,  and  who 
has  guarded  for  thousands  of  years  the 
ground  and  the  hole  under  the  ground,  so 
that  no  poor  man  could  get  at  them  ex- 
cept on  terms  the  rich  man  dictated, — 
has  now  added,  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
a  third  means  of  subjection  —  the 
Machine.  There  was  a  time  once  when 
the  poor  man  at  least  had  his  hands. 
Whatever  happened  to  him,  he  felt  that 


he  had  at  least  his  hands.     But  now  he  Millionaire's 
has  not  even  his  hands.     His  hands  are  " 

nothing  without  a  machine  and  the 
machine  costs  money.  If  he  wants  to 
make  the  work  of  his  hands  worth  any- 
thing he  must  ask  the  rich  man  to  let  him 
have  a  machine  for  it. 

Then,  what  happens  next?  The  rich 
man  having  gained,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
ground  and  the  guarded  hole  under  the 
ground,  a  purely  military  advantage,  at 
once  proceeds  to  use  it  all  for  himself. 
The  poor  man  takes  the  rich  man's 
machine  and  stands  by  it,  makes  the 
machine  into  six  hundred  men.  The  rich 
man  pays  him  (what  he  has  always  paid 
him)  the  wages  of  one  man  and  pockets 
the  wages  of  the  other  five  hundred  and 
ninety-nine.  It  looks  like  a  plain  case  of 
military  occupation,  the  man  with  the  gun 
threatening  the  man  with  the  fist.  We 
have  grown  rather  used  to  it.  Some  of 
us  are  so  used  to  it  that  we  think  it  is  the 
nature  of  things.  And  yet  if  one  were 

53 


inspired       to  account  honestly  f  or  a  certain  low  tone, 

Millionaires  .    •  i  -i  •   » 

a  certain  modern  meanness  which  seems 
to  have  come  into  the  business  and  indus- 
try of  the  world  in  these  later  years,  it 
would  not  be  too  much  to  say  that  it  is 
because  the  ideals  and  methods  of  busi- 
ness have  slowly  fallen  into  the  hands  of 
a  man  with  a  gun,  who  is  capable  of 
threatening  a  man  with  a  fist. 

Under  conditions  that  formerly  ob- 
tained, a  certain  type  of  man  was  often 
encountered  as  a  leader  of  industry.  He 
made  being  a  manufacturer  almost  an  art, 
and  he  gave  to  commerce  in  many  com- 
munities the  dignity  of  the  professions. 
When  this  type  of  man  found  gradually, 
as  things  were  going,  that  leading  in  busi- 
ness, meant  leading  with  a  gun,  he 
dropped  his  gun  and  went  out  of  business. 
So  things  have  grown  worse  and  worse. 
A  man  with  a  gun  always  grows  worse, 
and  now  there  is  a  whole  crowd  of  men 
with  a  gun  keeping  each  other  in  counte- 
nance, egging  each  other  on,  and  hiring 

54 


philosophers  to  make  the  gun  look  wise  Millionaire's 
and  like  a  law  of  nature,  and  artists  to  rs ' 

make  it  look  beautiful,  and  lawyers  to 
make  it  look  legal,  and  churches  to  make 
it  look  right  —  until  it  looks  for  all  the 
world  like  God's  Gun  to  most  of  us.  And 
so  things  have  gone  with  the  world.  We 
begin  to  spell  out  the  new  century,  a  great 
wonder  and  pain  upon  us  —  some  of  us. 
What  is  it  we  see  as  we  look  forth?  Soci- 
ety moved  to  its  foundations,  our  whole 
modern  life,  slowly,  mightily,  across  the 
world,  and  with  a  great  sigh  of  a  hundred 
years  lifts  up  from  this  nineteenth  cen- 
tury at  last,  rousing  itself.  With  our 
own  eyes  we  are  seeing  it.  It  is  making 
itself  ready  for  the  longest  reckoning^ 
the  greatest  battle  in  history.  The  field 
is  already  white  with  the  tents.  They  are 
going  out  to  meet  each  other  unless  some- 
thing can  be  done  about  it — on  the  one 
side  Capital,  God  with  a  Gun,  going  out 
to  meet  Man  —  Man  with  a  Fist  —  a 
terrible  light  in  his  eyes.  This  is  what  the 

55 


inspired       inspired  millionaire  sees,  as  he  looks  ahead. 

Millionaires 


hard  as  he  thinks  —  even  with  the  gun 
in  his  hands  and  his  fingers  playing  with 
the  trigger  —  not  to  think  against  him- 
self. In  action  it  may  be  easy  to  side 
with  a  gun,  but  in  thinking,  a  gun  does  not 
help.  One  gets  a  little  ashamed  of  think- 
ing with  a  gun.  The  result  is,  that  when 
an  inspired  millionaire  gets  started  he  is 
more  ashamed  of  himself  than  anyone  else 
could  possibly  be.  He  becomes  ashamed 
of  his  whole  class,  and  of  the  years  be- 
fore he  was  born.  In  former  days,  when 
the  rich  man  had  the  mountains  and  the 
valleys  and  the  holes  under  the  ground 
with  which  to  fight  the  poor  man,  he  was 
taking  away  where  his  food  was,  and  where 
his  body  was  buried.  And  now  he  has 
added  machines  and  taken  away  his  hands, 
and  he  has  not  merely  taken  away  his  hands 
—  made  them  empty,  useless  things,  mere 
flourishes  on  his  trunk  —  but  he  has  taken 
away  his  soul.  Formerly,  when  a  rich 
56 


man  fought  with  a  poor  one,  he  let  him  Millionaire's 
fight  out  doors,  let  him  have  a  whole  sky  ple ^  irs ' 
to  fight  under,  and  the  breath  of  heaven. 
The  way  he  fights  with  him  now  is  to  shut 
him  up  with  a  cog,  ten  hours  a  day,  until 
he  is  a  cog  himself.  The  damage  the  rich 
man  has  done  with  the  machine  in  taking 
away  the  poor  man's  hands,  —  the  new, 
strange  babyishness  and  helplessness  of 
his  hands,  is  nothing  to  the  damage  that 
is  done  in  taking  away  his  brains  ten 
hours  a  day,  in  making  them  sick  and 
helpless,  and  vague,  and  mean,  and  full  of 
evil,  and  weakness,  and  wrath.  When  a 
man's  brain  has  been  shut  in  with  a  lever 
or  a  cog  ten  hours  a  day,  when  his  brain 
has  become  a  mere  click  on  his  shoulders 
—  and  a  particular  kind  of  click  at  that  — 
to  go  with  the  click  of  the  particular 
machine  that  is  turning  out  his  life  be- 
side him,  the  problem  of  how  to  get  on 
with  such  a  man,  the  problem  of  whether 
more  money  can  be  made  out  of  him  by 
crushing  him  more,  and  throwing  him 

57 


inspired  a  way,  or  by  letting  him  be  slowly  put 
8  together,  so  that  he  will  work  better,  is  the 
question  to  be  faced.  The  inspired  mil- 
lionaire finds  himself  weighing  these 
facts.  He  sees  what  the  men  who  have 
gone  before  him  have  done.  He  looks 
over  the  remnants  of  men  they  have  left 
him  for  carrying  on  the  business,  and  what 
is  there  he  can  do?  They  had  Long 
Johns.  He  cannot  get  them.  What  is 
the  best  he  can  do,  with  the  men  he  has? 
So  it  becomes  the  daily  problem  of  the 
inspired  millionaire,  "  What  are  the  con- 
ditions of  work  and  habits  of  mind  that 
need  to  be  arranged  for,  in  my  factory, 
to  make  men  who  work  with  machines, 
keep  thinking  of  things?  " 


II 

WA  TER 

And  Elijah  said  :  Fill  four  barrels  with  water 
and  pour  it  on  the  burnt  sacrifice  and  on  the  wood.9 
And  he  said,  '  Do  it  the  second  time. '  And  they  did 
it  the  second  time.  And  he  said,  Do  it  the  third 
time.9  And  they  did  it  the  third  time." 


An  Arrangement  for  Being  Allowed  to 
Think. 


are  many  details  and  diffi- 
^  culties  that  need  to  be  considered, 
and  it  takes  a  great  deal  of  patience  and 
repetition  and  self-restraint,  to  arrange 
and  conduct  a  factory  in  such  a  way  that 
men  are  allowed  to  think  in  it. 

Out  of  the  many  methods  that  might  be 
employed  for  this  purpose,  it  may  be  well 
in  this  second  section  of  this  book  to  pick 
out  one  method  and  deal  with  it  con- 
cretely. 

The  method  proposed  may  not  be  the 
best  one  in  itself,  perhaps,  but  it  is 
brought  forward  as  the  one  which  best  il- 
lustrates the  general  principle  that  would 
be  likely  to  run  through  any  or  all  meth- 
ods an  inspired  millionaire  might  employ. 

It  is  not  claimed  for  this  method  that 

61 


inspired  it  solves  the  problem  in  all  of  its  details, 
but  I  do  believe  that  it  is  a  good  sample 
method,  and  that  operated  by  an  employer 
who  believes  in  it,  and  applied  strictly  to 
employees  who  believe  in  it  and  deserve 
it,  it  contains  the  principle  that  goes  to 
the  root  of  the  matter.  If  a  factory  is 
to  have  live  men  scattered  through  the 
machines  in  it,  —  that  is,  if  it  is  to  be  a 
live  factory  through  and  through  —  it 
must  arrange  for  an  exchange  system  of 
employment  as  well  as  a  specialist  one. 

The  idea  is  not  that  this  exchange  sys- 
tem of  employment  should  be  applied  to 
the  rank  and  file  of  the  factory,  but  that 
the  few  men  in  every  factory  who  are  cre- 
ative, who  have  it  born  in  them  to  master 
a  whole  factory  by  degrees,  who  are  capa- 
ble of  overflowing  their  work,  like  Vree- 
land,  the  brakeman  (who  overflowed  into 
a  whole  railroad),  should  have  ample 
provision  made  for  them,  both  for  the 
sake  of  the  factory  and  for  themselves. 
The  main  feature  of  this  plan  is  that  every 
62 


man  shall  be  given  a  chance,  if  he  wants  An 

it,  at  the  rest  of  the  factory,  shall  be  al- 

lowed  within  certain  limits  to  choose  ap-  Allowed  to 

Think 

prenticeships  all  his  life,  to  spend  part  of 
his  working-time  and  a  regular  part  of  it, 
in  doing  other  men's  work. 

The  reason  for  this  is  not  merely  that 
men  who  keep  growing  and  who  always 
have  something  young  and  new  before 
them,  will  pay  in  the  long  run  and  do  bet- 
ter work  from  day  to  day  as  they  go  back 
to  their  own  machines.  Many  of  them 
will  secure  unexpected  results  on  the 
machines  they  are  merely  wondering 
about  and  cannot  run  and  do  not  under- 
stand. 

Almost  all  inventions  in  behalf  of 
women  have  come  from  men  who  have 
been  obliged,  for  some  sudden  reason  or 
for  a  little  while,  to  do  women's  work. 
Photography  has  developed  more  in  ten 
years  by  the  blunders  of  amateurs  than 
it  has  in  forty  by  the  labors  of  profes- 
sionals. Modern  industry  is  a  race  of  in- 
63 


inspired       ventions  against  inventions.     The  soul  of 

Millionaires    .  ...  i      >, 

invention  is  not  regularity,  or  even  ac- 
curacy, or  any  of  the  other  things  that 
are  grown  in  a  man  hy  being  too  intimate 
with  a  machine.  The  power  in  a  mind 
that  makes  for  invention  is  its  skill  in 
turning  irregularity  and  blundering  into 
inspiration.  The  inventive  mind  works 
by  cross-fertilizing.  It  minds  its  own 
business,  but  it  minds  it  with  a  large  and 
sometimes  rather  useless-looking  margin. 
A  machine  is  quite  as  likely  to  be  im- 
proved by  a  man  who  does  not  quite  know 
how  to  work  it,  as  it  is  by  one  who  does. 
A  man  who  comes  over  from  some  other 
machine  and  wonders  —  who  visits  a 
machine  with  his  mind  a  day  or  so  —  may 
accomplish  more  with  it  than  a  man  who 
works  with  it  all  his  life. 

It  is  as  good  a  principle  in  industry  and 
in  mechanics  as  it  is  in  law,  medicine,  and 
the  arts,  and  in  biology,  that  specialization 
is  a  source  of  weakness  as  well  as  strength. 
It  is  as  true  of  factory  hands  as  it  is  of 
64 


silk    worms,    Jerseys,    chrysanthemums,  An 
and  horses,  that  the  breeding  of  special 
qualities  breaks  down  vital  force.     The  Allowed  to 

Think 

men  who  do  the  inventive  and  revolution- 
ary things  in  machinery  are  the  men  who 
put  something  with  something  else,  and 
factories  that  do  large  things  in  the  long 
run  are  only  going  to  be  able  to  do  them 
by  having  a  high  average  of  large  men  in 
them,  men  who  can  do  more  than  one 
thing,  and  who,  for  that  reason,  can  make 
combinations,  and  invent  devices,  of  which 
the  mere  specialist  would  never  think. 

Experience  in  dealing  with  different 
grades  of  factory  hands  in  strikes  goes 
to  show  that  a  man  who  thinks  can  be  de- 
pended upon  to  think,  generally,  as  much 
as  the  kind  of  machine  he  works  with 
will  let  him  think.  After  a  long  struggle, 
factory  owners  were  convinced  that  light 
and  air  in  factories,  for  men's  bodies,  paid. 
The  next  thing  they  are  going  to  allow 
for,  is  light  and  air  for  their  minds.  They 
are  going  to  see  that  almost  any  kind  of 
65 


inspired       waste  can  be  better  afforded  in  a  factory 

Millionaires  .,  , .  .     ,      ,_, 

than  wasting  men  s  minds.  Throwing  away 
a  machine  now  and  then  is  nothing —  com- 
pared to  throwing  away  a  man  who  could 
think  of  a  machine.  It  is  a  mere  matter 
of  experiment  and  competition  when  all 
factories  will  mid  this  out,  and  will  treat 
their  men  accordingly.  They  will  realize 
that  to  put  a  man  for  five,  ten,  or  fifteen 
years  into  solitary  confinement  with  a 
machine,  is  really  to  throw  away  the  ma- 
chine and  the  man  both. 

Long  John  was  discharged  because  he 
wanted  to  keep  on  being  a  man.  Many 
men's  faults  are  virtues  that  a  factory 
management  is  not  shrewd  enough  to  use. 
The  real  trouble  with  Long  John  was, 
that,  as  the  superintendent  said:  "He 
could  not  keep  in  his  place."  He  was 
always  wanting  to  do  other  men's  work. 
When  he  learned  to  do  a  thing,  and  could 
do  it  perfectly,  he  wanted  to  do  something 
else  perfectly.  As  long  as  he  found  him- 
self, body  and  soul,  acting  on  the  machine, 

66 


he  kept  at  it.     The  moment  his  work  be-  An 
came  mechanical,  and  the  machine  began 


to  act  on  him,  he  wanted  to  give  it  up.    It  ^p0™*  to 

Think 

is  not  unreasonable  that  mechanics  who 
really  have  something  on  their  minds 
should  be  allowed  to  move  within  certain 
limits  at  least,  when  their  minds  move,  and 
that  a  man  like  Long  John,  instead  of 
being  discharged  for  being  interested  in 
machinery,  should  be  given  as  many  ma- 
chines as  he  likes. 

In  everything  except  manufactures  this 
general  principle  has  been  proved  again 
and  again.  It  is  acknowledged  to  be  a 
mere  matter  of  business  common  sense 
and  foresight,  that  if  a  Cab  Company  is 
going  to  make  money  out  of  its  horses  it 
must  allow  them  to  keep  on  being  horses. 
The  most  available  method  in  a  machine 
shop  of  allowing  men  to  keep  on  being 
men  would  seem  to  be  to  give  them  the 
freedom  of  the  shop  at  times  and  let  them 
go  about  thinking  in  it.  Within  certain 
limits  a  part  of  every  man's  labor  should 
67 


inspired  be  deliberately  sacrificed  to  apprentice- 
8  ship  and  experiment  for  the  benefit  of  all 
concerned.  The  men  in  the  shops  who 
are  going  to  think  of  the  most  improve- 
ments are  going  to  be  the  men  who  come 
in  practical  contact  with  the  most  things 
that  need  to  be  improved.  They  will  get 
into  the  habit  of  shifting  ideas  from  one 
department  to  another,  or  from  one 
machine  to  another,  a  habit  of  putting 
things  together.  The  money  that  is 
often  spent  in  giving  prizes  to  employees 
for  ideas  would  be  a  great  deal  better 
spent,  in  the  long  run,  in  giving  them 
room  to  have  the  ideas.  The  most 
natural  way  of  making  room  in  a  man's 
mind,  of  letting  him  visit  in  other  men's 
ideas  and  letting  them  visit  in  his,  is  to  let 
him  try  to  do  the  work  of  the  other  men. 


68 


II. 

Superintendents  and  Ideas 

IT  IS  obvious  that  several  practical 
difficulties  would  have  to  be  overcome 
in  establishing  a  system  of  partial  rotary 
employment  in  a  factory.  The  first 
thing  to  do  with  such  a  plan  would  seem 
to  be  to  find  a  superintendent  who  believes 
in  it.  The  second  thing  to  do,  if  one 
failed  to  find  a  superintendent  who  be- 
lieved in  it,  would  be  not  to  try  it.  It  is 
not  claimed  for  the  idea  that  it  could  be 
carried  out  by  a  man  who  does  not  believe 
in  it.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  some 
ground  for  the  opinion  that  when  the  in- 
spired millionaire  has  overcome  the  first 
difficulty  —  has  found  a  man  who  believes 
in  it,  the  solution  of  most  of  the  other  dif- 
ficulties will  be  found  well  under  way. 

Perhaps  it  might  be  well  to  state  what 
kind  of  man  such  a  manager  would  be 
69 


inspired  likely  to  be,  if  he  is  to  be  successful  in 
8  carrying  out  his  belief.  He  will  begin,  I 
believe,  by  having  it  explicitly  understood 
among  all  concerned  that,  in  taking  the 
position  of  manager  or  superintendent  of 
the  factory,  he  is  taking  it  as  the  personal 
representative  and  champion  of  every 
man  who  works  in  it,  and  of  every  man 
who  owns  it,  and  of  the  great  public 
outside  that  is  buying  its  goods. 
He  will  proceed  on  the  principle  that 
every  act  of  every  day  of  his  life  is  to  be 
governed  by  the  interests  of  these  three 
groups  of  men,  that  in  proportion  as  he 
can  braid  these  interests  together,  make 
them  inextricably  mutual  and  keep  them 
so,  he  is  establishing  a  permanent  and 
prosperous  career  for  both  the  business 
and  himself. 

The  first  objection  such  a  superintend- 
ent would  encounter  in  attempting  to  in- 
troduce a  partial  rotary  system  of  em- 
ployment in  his  factory  would  probably 
come  from  the  union  men.  The  labor 


unions  would  oppose  it  on  the  ground  Superintend- 
that  it  would  lead  to  the  discovery  of  more 
men,  and  of  more  men's  actual  qualities 
at  more  points,  than  would  be  otherwise 
possible,  and  would  inevitably  result  in 
the  giving  of  more  freedom  and  wages 
to  some  men  than  to  others.  The  labor 
unions  have  not  outgrown  the  idea  of 
treating  all  men  alike.  The  firm  would 
oppose  it  on  the  ground  that  if  a  factory 
is  alive  all  through,  and  many  of  the  men 
are  able  to  do  a  great  many  things,  it  is 
harder  to  keep  the  secrets  in  the  business 
from  the  public,  and  the  secrets  in  the 
profits  from  the  men,  and  more  difficult 
to  keep  the  men  and  the  public  both  from 
insubordination.  It  is  obvious  that  the 
only  man  who  can  manage  an  unbusiness- 
like situation  —  that  is,  a  situation  of 
mutual  distrust  like  this  —  is  a  superin- 
tendent who  has,  as  his  first  business 
equipment,  the  supremacy  and  the  probity 
of  his  own  personal  character.  As  long 
as  it  is  neither  possible  nor  desirable  to  run 
71 


inspired  a  great  business  without  secrets,  the  only 
man  that  can  act  as  superintendent  of  a 
live  firm  with  secrets,  and  of  a  factory 
that  is  alive  all  through  and  likes  to  know 
secrets,  is  the  man  who  can  keep  secrets 
with  fairness,  and  who  can  win  and  hold 
personal  confidence  on  all  sides.  He  will 
not  be  looked  upon  by  the  employees  (like 
most  superintendents)  as  the  hired  man 
of  the  Firm.  He  will  be  too  much  of  a 
man  to  belong  to  anybody  and  not  to  be- 
long to  the  whole  business  from  the  bot- 
tom to  the  top,  and  he  will  be  looked  upon 
by  employees,  and  by  the  Firm,  both,  as 
their  personal  representative  in  dealing 
with  the  other. 

I  am  ready  to  admit  that  if  an  inspired 
millionaire  desired  to  acquire  a  superin- 
tendent with  a  first-class  mind  or  a  busi- 
ness-imagination like  this,  he  would  find 
it  -hard  to  attract  him  with  an  ordinary 
salary.  But  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that, 
as  things  are  going  now,  we  are  likely  to 
see  in  the  near  future  an  entirely  new  rank 

7* 


or  grade  of  mind  in  the  positions  of  super-  Supenntend- 
intendents.  All  of  these  innumerable 
anonymous  owners  of  factories  —  these 
stockholders  and  drawers  of  dividends 
and  interest,  their  huge  pulpy,  helpless, 
unmanned  capital  mounting  up  over  their 
heads  —  are  slowly  and  painfully  being 
brought  to  the  point  where  they  will  en- 
tirely change  their  idea  of  the  price  that 
it  pays  to  pay  for  manning  capital  and 
making  it  alive  all  through.  The  proba- 
bilities seem  to  be  that  if  our  millionaire^ 
are  able  to  secure  such  a  man  as  I  have 
described,  to  conduct  their  money  for 
them,  they  will  not  only  be  glad  to  do  it 
on  the  specific  condition  that  he  shall  con- 
duct it  freely  and  according  to  his  own 
ideas,  but  they  will  realize  how  much  it  is 
worth  to  have  a  man  who  can.  The  indi- 
cations are  that  when  our  modern  money 
is  being  generally  invested  once  more,  on 
far-sighted  or  human  principles,  it  is  not 
going  to  be  the  man  who  furnishes  the 
money  for  the  business  nor  the  man  who 

73 


inspired  does  the  work,  but  the  man  who  holds  the 
business  together  —  who  makes  it  alive  all 
over  —  who  shall  receive  the  largest  in- 
dustrial rewards.  The  large-minded,  in- 
gathering, centripetal  superintendent,  the 
man  who,  by  his  human  nature,  his  per- 
sonal qualities  and  insights,  brings  all  the 
sources  of  power  in  a  business  to  a  head, 
is  going  to  be  allowed,  as  a  matter  of 
course,  by  all  concerned,  the  highest  pre- 
mium that  business  affords.  When  the 
crash  comes  and  the  successful  superin- 
tendent under  the  present  regime  —  the 
man  who  conducts  business  on  the  prin- 
ciple of  suspended  hostility  —  goes  for- 
ever out  of  power,  and  the  new  type  of 
man  steps  forward  to  his  place,  the  man 
who  believes  that  being  human  is  practical 
and  good  business,  no  one  will  find  fault 
with  him  for  getting  rich.  He  will  be 
watched  with  relief,  and  everybody  will 
fall  in  and  help.  Everybody  will  see  that 
if  a  superintendent  can  be  found,  who 
really  has  a  soul,  he  ought  to  be  paid  a  sal- 

74 


ary  which  shall  approximate  to  the  actual  Superintend- 
market  value  a  soul  has,  in  this  modern  "1' 
business  world.  A  man  who  has  the  spirit- 
ual power  of  putting  himself  in  the  place 
of  everybody  and  holding  everybody  in 
place,  who  is  doing,  or  as  good  as  doing, 
everybody's  work,  can  be  as  rich  as  he  likes. 
Nobody  in  a  factory  will  quarrel  with  the 
fact  that  he  ought  to  have  more  profit  in 
proportion  than  the  millionaire  or  the  pro- 
ducer, or  laborer,  or  than  everybody. 
He  uses  his  profit  to  give  everybody  a 
chance.  To  let  such  a  man  get  rich  is  put- 
ting money  in  one's  pocket. 

Under  these  conditions  it  does  not  seem 
to  me  that  (especially  when  a  few  sample 
superintendents  have  become  known 
throughout  the  country)  the  imprac- 
ticability of  getting  such  superintendents 
will  be  so  very  great.  I  cannot  help  be- 
lieving that  the  first  moment  we  have  live 
superintendents  over  these  great  fac- 
tories of  ours  —  these  little  cities  of 
machines  —  the  factories  will  be  al- 

75 


inspired  lowed  to  be  alive  too.  While  it  is  true 
that  there  are  very  few  such  superintend- 
ents occupying  positions  now,  and  that, 
under  present  conditions,  even  those  are 
working  under  enormous  difficulties,  and 
under  protest,  I  believe  that  these  men 
have  been  made,  and  are  biding  their  time 
in  our  modern  business  world.  The  indi- 
cations are  that  the  first  moment  our  mod- 
ern capital,  which  at  present,  in  a  kind 
of  brutal,  stunned,  morally-underwitted 
mood,  seems  to  be  lunging  along,  is  sud- 
denly jarred  into  its  senses,  and  wakes  up, 
and  sees  how  helpless  it  really  is  without 
men  like  this  —  the  men  will  be  there.  I 
place  my  faith  in  these  men.  If  I  am 
wrong  and  it  is  really  true  that  such  men 
are  not  to  be  had  for  our  factories,  that, 
they  are  not  being  made,  it  would  pay  our 
great  millionaires  to  give  up  starting  fac- 
tories for  awhile,  altogether,  and  try 
churches. 

Factories  are  not  alive  all  through  be- 
cause they  are  not  organic.     The  best  they 
76 


have  attained  as  yet,  most  of  them,  is  a  Supenntend- 


sort  of  organized  suspended  hostility.  n 
The  real  reason  that  factories  are  not  or- 
ganic and  cannot  become  organic  is  that 
nobody  believes  in  anybody.  It  is  getting 
to  be  a  literal  business  truth  that  what  the 
typical  modern  factory  most  needs  to  go 
with  its  plant  to-day  is  a  creed  —  or  pos- 
sibly a  church  on  the  premises,  where  all 
the  people  in  the  factory  could  go  —  mas- 
ter and  workmen  —  and  kneel  together 
until  they  amount  to  something  —  that  is, 
amount  to  enough,  have  religion  and  in- 
sight enough,  to  work  their  souls  together. 
Business  is  being  done  on  so  large  a  scale 
and  so  far  ahead  that  it  is  getting  to  be  no 
longer  practical  not  to  have  a  soul  in  it. 
If  a  man  is  going  to  be  a  superintendent 
or  a  worker,  if  he  is  going  into  business 
in  the  twentieth  century,  let  him  get  down 
on  his  knees.  The  next  great  event  in  the 
business  world  is  going  to  be  a  religious 
event,  the  making  of  men  who  shall  have 
it  in  them  to  tie  to  great  faiths,  to  the  great 

77 


inspired       permanent  facts  of  human  nature  and  of 

Millionaires    .11  •   ••  »i  i     T      • 

the  human  spirit  — silent,  serene,  believing 
men,  who  carry  great  burdens  with  glad- 
ness and  boyishness  and  who  do  their  liv- 
ing and  working  in  some  great  daily  faith 
in  one  another. 

It  is  obvious  that  the  next  best  substi- 
tute in  a  factory,  for  a  church  on  the 
grounds  —  some  place  for  smelting  the 
men  together  —  is  to  have  a  superintend- 
ent who  is  a  sort  of  church  all  by  himself. 


Ill 

Unions  and  Ideas. 

WHEN  the  inspired  millionaire  has 
secured  for  his  factory  as  super- 
intendent, or  Soul  of  the  Business,  a  man 
who  believes  that  souls  are  a  necessary 
part  of  the  running  gear  of  a  factory,  the 
whole  matter  of  carrying  out  some  ex- 
change system,  or  partial-rotary  system  of 
employment  for  the  men  who  want  it, 
becomes  one  of  determining  and  adjusting 
details.  The  two  main  horns  of  the 
dilemma,  in  allowing  souls  in  factories, 
would  seem  to  be  met  at  the  outset  by  the 
character  of  the  superintendent. 

The  men  in  the  labor  unions  who  would 
object  at  first  to  a  system  of  apprentice- 
ship a  part  of  each  day  or  week,  would  ob- 
ject on  the  ground  that  if  the  entire  fac- 
tory is  going  to  be  thrown  open  to  every- 
body in  it  —  exposed  to  a  procession  of 

79 


inspired  men  thinking  of  things,  no  one  man  in  the 
whole  establishment  would  feel  secure  in 
his  place.  He  feels  that  some  one  might 
come  along  at  almost  any  minute  who  will 
know  more  (by  accident  almost)  about  his 
work,  or  about  his  machine,  than  he  does. 
So  he  takes  his  stand  in  favor  of  shutting 
every  man  carefully  in  with  his  own  little 
click  of  skill.  He  does  not  think  himself, 
but  he  knows  that  no  one  else  will  be  let  in 
to  think,  and  feels  safe.  The  conditions 
may  have  forced  it  upon  him,  but  to  a  de- 
gree it  must  be  admitted  that  this  man, 
standing  there  clicking  his  little  click  day 
after  day,  all  by  himself,  is  at  bottom  some- 
thing of  a  coward.  If  everything  is  being 
left  open  in  the  factory,  if  the  machines 
are  being  ventilated  every  day  or  so  with 
men  pouring  through  them,  he  fears  that 
it  will  be  found  out  that  he  has  a  better 
place  than  belongs  to  him.  He  makes  up 
his  mind  he  will  keep  it  whether  it  belongs 
to  him  or  not.  A  state  of  affairs  in  which 
he  will  have  to  defend  himself  from  other 
80 


men's  thinking  of  things  about  his  machine,  Unions  and 
by  going  out  and  thinking  of  things  for 
theirs,  fills  him  with  forebodings,  and  mor- 
alizing, and  a  love  of  making  rules  for 
those  who  are  ahead.  So  he  persuades  the 
labor  union  to  hold  labor  down.  "  Do  not 
allow  this  thinking  of  things,"  he  says,  "  to 
go  on."  "  Keep  your  place  and  let  every- 
body else  keep  his.  Do  not  let  the  ma- 
chines in  our  factory,  or  the  men  beside 
the  machines,  or  the  factory  as  a  whole, 
improve  or  grow  any  more  than  can  be 
helped." 

Under  the  mechanical  system  that  gen- 
erally obtains  in  our  factories  there  is  no 
denying  that  this  position  of  the  employee 
is  natural.  Given  another  system,  how- 
ever, which  is  based  on  daily  human  in- 
sights into  human  possibilities,  which  has 
a  superintendent  who  makes  it  the  soul  of 
the  business  to  discover  the  best  qualities 
of  all  his  men,  and  put  those  best  qualities 
where  they  will  work  best,  it  is  obvious  that 
the  whole  situation  of  the  individual  em- 

81 


inspired  ployee  is  changed.  He  would  discover  in 
s  time,  as  he  took  his  superintendent  in,  that 
his  interests  and  the  interests  of  the  super- 
intendent, and  the  factory  are  identical, 
that  the  most  creative,  and  interesting,  the 
most  self -expressive  and  natural  thing 
that  he  can  do,  or  think  of  to  do,  in  that 
factory  will  be  the  thing  that,  sooner  or 
later,  will  come  into  his  hands.  He  will 
feel  sure  of  this  because  it  is  the  policy  of 
the  factory,  and  will  earn  the  most  money 
for  him,  and  for  everybody  else. 

The  other  objection  that  men  in  the 
unions  would  make  to  allowing  men 
around  thinking  in  factories,  would  be, 
that  it  would  result  in  the  promotion  of 
some  men  at  the  expense  of  others.  This, 
also,  like  the  objection  that  has  just  been 
described,  is  met  by  the  character,  that  is, 
by  the  business  equipment,  of  the  super- 
intendent. When  an  employee  thinks  of 
something  of  enormous  value  to  the  firm 
and  is  suddenly  elevated  above  the  rest,  in 
proportion  to  the  value  of  what  he  has 
82 


thought  of,  several  things  promptly  hap-  Unions  and 
pen,  if  the  factory  is  not  a  live  factory. 
Three  parties  in  the  factory,  if  anyone 
suddenly  thinks,  are  sure  to  feel  injured, 
and  to  set  to  work  to  defend  themselves. 
The  common  hands  do  not  want  a  man  out 
of  their  own  grade  promoted  over  their 
heads,  because  he  will  receive  a  benefit 
from  what  he  has  thought  of,  which  they 
will  not  share,  and  which  may  be  employed 
against  them.  The  members  of  the  firm 
promptly  line  up  in  the  same  posi- 
tion. There  is  danger  that  the  man 
will  employ  his  invention  against 
the  firm.  He  may  use  it  either 
to  extort  privileges  for  himself,  or  to 
leave  the  factory,  and  sell  to  rivals.  So 
it  comes  to  pass  in  the  typical  ordinary 
factory  which  does  not  believe  in  being 
alive,  that  if  a  man  suddenly  acts  in  it  as 
if  he  were  alive,  a  minute,  he  finds  his  hand 
is  against  every  man,  and  every  man 
against  his.  A  penalty  on  being  alive  is 
crowded  into  every  cog  and  wheel  of  ma- 
ss 


inspired       chinery  and  into  every  crevice  of  manhood 

Millionaires      r  •!  i 

about  the  place. 

Given  another  system  and  a  superin- 
tendent who  believes  something,  and  the 
situation  is  changed.  The  character  of 
the  superintendent,  instead  of  driving 
every  man  back  upon  his  own  interests 
against  all  the  others,  acts  as  a  tremendous 
centripetal  force,  holds  all  of  the  interests 
of  all  the  men  together.  The  man  who 
is  promoted  for  thinking  of  something 
knows  that  the  superintendent  will  see  to 
it  that  his  reward  will  be  great,  that  he  will 
not  be  treated  as  a  mere  hand,  but  will  have 
his  fair  share,  no  matter  what  his  position 
is,  of  the  actual  money  his  invention  has 
earned  for  the  firm.  He  knows  also, 
through  the  superintendent,  that  his  fac- 
tory will  make  it  a  point  to  make  better 
terms  with  him  than  any  other  would.  In 
other  words,  the  more  a  man  thinks  in  such 
a  factory,  the  more  everything  he  thinks 
identifies  him  with  it. 

The  same  principle  holds  good  of  the 


other  factors  in  the  situation.  The  men  Unions  and 
over  whose  heads  a  man  has  been  pro- 
moted for  thinking,  instead  of  opposing 
his  promotion,  will  be  sure  to  desire  it. 
They  will  know  that  the  superintendent  is 
looking  out  for  their  interest.  The  only 
reason  that  men  object  to  a  man's  being 
promoted  over  their  heads,  is  that  superin- 
tendents do  not  make  them  feel  that  the 
man's  success  is  going  to  be  theirs,  as  well 
as  his,  that  their  interests  and  his  are  iden- 
tified, and  that  everybody  —  more  or  less 
—  has  really  been  promoted  with  him.  It 
is  because  the  men  who  have  belonged  to 
the  laboring  class  in  modern  industry,  and 
who  have  thought  of  things,  and  risen  out 
of  it,  have  not  acted  or  been  influenced  to 
act  as  saviors  with  their  inventions,  or  as 
redeemers  of  their  class;  it  is  because  they 
have  seemed  to  turn  against  their  class  as 
they  rose,  have  shared  with  the  men  above 
them,  and  never  with  the  men  below  — 
that  the  prejudice  of  the  present-day  la- 
boring man  against  allowing  a  laboring 
85 


inspired       man  to   improve,  has   grown   so   insur- 

Millionaires  ,11 

mountable. 

Given  a  superintendent  who  believes 
that  men  who  work  with  machines  can 
have  souls,  who  sees  that  the  manufactur- 
ing business  is  really  the  business  of  put- 
ting men's  souls  together  and  making 
them  work,  and  not  a  mere  business  of 
putting  together  fragments  of  iron  and 
glass  and  wood — the  situation  is  changed. 
The  factory  becomes  organic  and  alive 
all  through.  The  first  moment  a  man 
really  thinks  of  something  the  factory 
feels  the  glow  and  thrill  of  it  all  over.  In 
such  a  factory  the  employees  and  owners 
and  the  public  become  as  members  of  one 
body  moving  and  growing  in  conscious 
health,  and  in  strength  and  joy  together. 
The  very  things  that  to-day  look  difficult 
and  impossible  become  a  matter  of  course. 

It  is  not  denied  that  a  live  factory,  like 
a  spirited  horse,  would  be  much  harder  to 
have  under  one  sometimes,  than  a  dead 
one.  But  the  kind  of  superintendent  who 

86 


does  not  enjoy  a  live  problem  squirming  Unions  and 
under  him  day  after  day,  who  does  not 
prefer  a  seething,  rising  and  falling  mass 
of  living  and  thinking,  going  on  under 
him,  is  the  kind  whose  days  are  numbered. 
The  inspired  millionaire,  instead  of  giving 
up  the  idea  of  having  a  live  factory  be- 
cause a  humdrum  superintendent  would  be 
thrown  by  it,  is  going  to  give  up  the  hum- 
drum superintendent.  He  is  going  to 
suspect  that  a  man  who  is  made  of  machin- 
ery on  one  side,  and  stock-exchange  on 
the  other,  with  all  the  human  nature  be- 
tween squeezed  out,  is  the  last  man  who 
can  make  a  success  of  running  a  great 
business  with  machines.  He  is  going  to 
suspect  that  the  power  of  conducting  a 
great  enterprise  that  is  filled  with  the 
hum  of  machines,  instead  of  being  a 
machine-like  power  — a  power  of  precision 
—  must  be  at  bottom  a  human,  artistic,  or 
divining  power  in  a  man,  the  power  of  put- 
ting oneself  in  the  place  of  other  men  and 
of  making  them  know  it. 
87 


inspired  The  assertion  that  a  superintendent  like 

8  this  is  impracticable,  that  such  men  cannot 
be  found  for  such  positions  is  only  true 
temporarily.  The  reason  that  the  more 
heroic  type  of  man  in  modern  times,  the 
kind  of  man  who  used  to  be  a  soldier  or  an 
artist  in  the  days  gone  by,  has  not  been  at- 
tracted by  the  factories  and  the  million- 
aires we  have  been  so  largely  hav- 
ing of  late,  is  that  the  conditions  both 
among  the  machines  and  among  the  mil- 
lionaires have  been  becoming  impossible. 
A  man  such  as  I  have  described  can  only 
take  a  position  by  changing  conditions 
both  for  himself  and  for  everybody  else. 
The  practical  difficulty  in  many  cases  is 
not  in  the  condition  of  the  men,  nor  of 
the  man,  who  might  be  superintendent, 
but  in  the  millionaire.  The  million- 
aire finds,  as  a  matter  of  experience,  that 
the  kind  of  man  he  would  really  like  for 
the  position  of  manager  is  a  man  who  can- 
not quite  be  managed.  Then  he  tries  to 
manage  him.  The  real  trouble  is  with  the 
millionaire.  He  has  had  it  proved  to  him, 


over  and  over  again,  that  the  men  that  Unions  and 

Ideas 

can  be  managed  cannot  manage  anyone 
else.     And  when  it  comes  to  making  an 
actual  choice  between  a  second-rate  super- 
intendent who  can  be  controlled  by  money, 
and  the  man  of  the  highest  order  of  gifts 
who  is  controlled  by  his  own  gifts,  the 
millionaire  chooses  the  second-rate  super- 
intendent.  So,  as  a  rule,  we  have  had  sec- 
ond-rate factories  with  money  on  top  of 
the  superintendent,  and  machines  on  top  of 
the  men  from  the  bottom  to  the  top.     The 
only  way  out  of  this  difficulty  is  a  change 
of  heart  on  the  part  of  the  millionaire,  the 
conviction  that  if  the  money  in  a  great  busi- 
ness wants  to  make  more  money,  it  must  be 
more  modest,  must  make  heavy  conces- 
sions at  the  start  to  brains  and  insight. 
The  man  who  sees  things,  cannot  be  had 
except  by  men  who  will  let  him  do  them.  It 
does  not  interest  him  to  be  a  mere  helpless 
adviser  —  a  dictionary  or  glossary  of  busi- 
ness, a  man  to  be  run  into,  or  looked  up, 
who  sells  little  flashes  of  insight  on  things 


inspired       that  he  cannot  do,  to  people  who  cannot 

Millionaires    j         .,  rr,1  ,     , 

do  them.  The  whole  arrangement  is 
superficial  and  blind,  and  from  hand  to 
mouth.  He  knows  that  great  ibusiness 
enterprises,  except  for  a  short  time,  cannot 
be  conducted  in  this  way,  by  brains  inter- 
rupted by  money.  He  has  the  spirit  and 
the  attitude  of  the  artist  and  the  only  kind 
of  money  that  in  the  long  run  controls  him 
is  the  money  that  buys  the  whole  of  him, 
buys  the  man  and  his  ideas  together,  on 
the  condition  that  he  shall  carry  them  out. 
Only  a  few  men  can  do  it,  but  the  men  who 
make  money  for  others  best,  are  those  who 
can  be  told  to  treat  it  as  their  own.  In 
proportion  as  the  money  in  a  business  and 
the  brains  are  inextricably  identified,  the 
more  it  is  going  to  succeed.  If  the  money 
and  the  brains  are  not  already  together  in 
the  same  man,  two  courses  are  possible  to 
try  to  gain  this  identity.  One  course  is 
for  the  money  to  make  a  hired  man  of  the 
brains  and  get  a  hired  man's  result.  And 
the  other  is  for  the  money  to  give  up  to  the 


brains  and  be  ruled  by  them.  The  first  Unions  and 
course  results  in  our  present  system  of 
second-rate  factories  and  the  general  slave 
system  of  modern  industry  from  the  bot- 
tom to  the  top.  The  second  course  is  com- 
ing in  soon,  because  all  it  has  to  do  is  to 
wait  for  the  first  to  be  played  out.  It  is 
merely  a  matter  of  things  becoming  bad 
enough  before  they  are  better.  With 
money  bullying  at  the  top,  and  foremen 
bullying  all  the  way  down  through,  the 
general  idea  that  men  who  work  with 
machines  cannot  have  souls,  and  had  better 
not  have  brains  if  they  can  help  it,  is  abun- 
dantly justified.  The  moment  that  our 
great  millionaires,  as  a  class,  have  come  to 
the  point  where  they  deal  with  other  men's 
spiritual  powers  as  respectfully  as  they  do 
with  their  dollars,  the  whole  manufactur- 
ing world  will  begin  to  be  placed  on  a  new 
footing.  The  time  is  not  far  off  when  it 
will  be  generally  taken  for  granted  by  all 
concerned  that  the  controlling  factor,  the 
strategic  position  in  industry,  instead  of 

91 


inspired       belonging  to  the  man  who  has  the  money, 


Millionaires   Qr  t() 


to  the  superintendent,  the  man  who  has  the 
ideas,  the  great  faiths  of  the  business  — 
who  is  the  soul  of  the  business,  who  holds 
the  owners,  and  the  men,  and  the  plant  in 
his  hands,  and  is  putting  them  together. 

Modern  industry  is  daily  living,  in  this 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century,  in  fear 
and  slavery,  and  drudgery  all  the  way 
through,  because  it  is  sick  industry.  And 
it  can  never  be  anything  else  but  sick  until 
it  acknowledges  that  the  soul  must  be  as 
supreme  in  business,  as  it  is  in  everything 
else.  Even  as  it  is,  it  is  only  the  soul 
struggling  up  through  in  it  which  keeps 
it  alive.  It  is  not  possible  to  have  a  great 
industry  in  a  great  nation  a  long  time, 
without  humble  millionaires  —  until  the 
men  with  brute  force,  the  men  who  are  top- 
heavy  and  dull  with  money,  are  seen  giv- 
ing place  gladly,  for  their  own  defense 
as  well  as  the  defense  of  all  of  us,  to  the 
men  who  have  spiritual  powers  in  business, 

9* 


who  see  things  and  do  things  by  using  Unions  and 
their  souls  daily,  and  by  getting  the  use  of 
the  souls  of  others.  There  is  no  reason 
why  a  factory,  if  enough  soul  is  poured 
in  with  the  money  at  the  top,  should  not 
be  as  spiritual  as  a  church,  and  as  educa- 
tional as  a  school,  in  the  town  where  it 
stands.  It  would  be  a  kind  of  ceaseless 
church  —  or  a  church  at  least  ten  hours 
a  day.  And  every  time  a  man  thought  of 
his  work,  it  would  rest  and  light  his  soul. 
His  work  would  become  to  him  a  part  of 
the  vision  of  the  making  of  a  world,  a 
daily,  hourly  unfolding,  a  kind  of  pan- 
orama of  his  larger  self,  reaching  out  be- 
fore him.  The  look  of  the  youth  would 
lurk  in  his  eyes  (as  it  does  in  all  who  really 
live)  down  to  the  farthest  slope  of  old 
age. 

There  is  as  much  room  for  imagination 
—  the  habit  of  visiting  in  things  with  one's 
mind  —  and  of  being  young  and  fresh 
before  them,  in  a  machine  shop  as  there  is 
in  poetry.  When  machine  shops  are  con- 

93 


inspired  ducted  as  they  are  going  to  be,  the  men 
who  work  in  them  (at  least  in  an  age  of 
machines  like  this)  are  going  to  be  more 
creative  men,  more  expressive,  progres- 
sive, and  original  in  their  work  than  any 
other  men  we  have.  The  idea  that  there 
is  something  in  a  machine  simply  as  a 
machine  which  makes  it  inherently  unspir- 
itual  is  based  upon  the  experience  of  the 
world,  but  it  is  after  all  a  rather  amateur 
and  juvenile  world  with  machines  as  yet. 
Its  ideas  are  in  their  first  stages  and  are 
based  for  the  most  part  upon  the  world's 
experience  with  second-rate  men,  working 
in  second-rate  factories,  men  who  have 
been  bullied,  and  could  be  bullied,  by  the 
machines  they  worked  with  into  being 
machines  themselves.  No  one  would 
think  of  denying  that  men  who  let 
machines  get  the  better  of  them  either  in 
their  minds  or  their  bodies  in  any  walk 
of  life,  grow  unspiritual  and  mechanical. 
But  it  does  not  take  a  machine  to  make  a 
machine  of  a  man.  Anything  will  do  it 

94 


if  the  man  will  let  it.  Even  the  farmer  Unions  and 
who  is  out  under  the  great  free  dome  of 
heaven  and  working  in  wonder  every  day 
of  his  life  grows  like  a  clod  if  he  buries 
his  soul  alive  in  the  soil.  But  farming 
has  been  tried  many  thousands  of  years 
and  the  other  kind  of  farmer  is  known  by 
everybody,  —  the  farmer  who  is  master 
over  the  soil,  who  instead  of  becoming  an 
expression  of  the  soil  himself,  makes  the 
soil  express  him.  The  next  thing  that  is 
going  to  happen  is,  that  everyone  is  going 
to  know  the  other  kind  of  mechanic.  It 
is  cheerfully  admitted  that  the  kind  of 
mechanic  we  largely  have  now,  who  allows 
himself  to  be  a  watcher  of  a  machine,  a 
turner-of -something  for  forty  years,  can 
hardly  be  classed  as  vegetable  life.  He  is 
not  even  organic  matter,  except  in  a  very 
small  part  of  himself.  But  it  is  not  the 
mechanical  machine  which  makes  the  man 
unspiritual.  It  is  the  mechanical  man 
beside  the  machine.  A  master  at  a  piano 
(which  is  a  machine)  makes  it  a  spiritual 

95 


inspired       thing,  and  a  master  at  a  printing  press, 
Millionaires  ^  wmiajn  Morris,  makes  it  a  free  and 

artistic  and  self-expressive  thing. 

It  is  only  a  second-rate  order  of  labor- 
union  and  administration  that  is  not  going 
to  recognize  this,  that  will  not  so  arrange 
a  man's  work  with  a  machine  eight  hours 
a  day  as  to  develop  the  man  and  the 
machine  together.  It  is  true  that  it  will 
be  difficult  to  arrange,  in  the  beginning, 
and  that  only  the  millionaire  who  believes 
in  it,  and  wants  it  a  great  deal,  will  be  able 
to  arrange  it,  and  he  will  only  be  able  to  do 
it  through  a  superintendent  who  believes 
in  it  as  he  does.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  the  moment  there  appears  a  richly- 
endowed  millionaire  who  sees  this  sort  of 
thing  there  will  appear  a  richly-endowed 
superintendent  to  go  with  him.  The 
moment  that  the  man  of  intellectual 
genius  —  of  spiritual  insight  —  even  of 
dramatic  insight  (the  power  of  knowing 
men's  souls  in  crowds  at  a  glance)  is  rec- 
ognized as  the  suitable  superintendent  for 
96 


a  factory,  the  whole  drift  of  the  life  with  Unions  and 
machines  will  change.  The  very  things 
that  now  tend  to  keep  the  machines  on  top 
of  the  men  in  factories  will  begin  to  put 
men  on  top  of  machines.  When  the  new 
type  of  superintendent  comes,  we  shall 
begin  to  feel  new  things  about  the  ma- 
chines and  the  men  beside  the  machines  — 
the  very  sound  of  machines  through  the 
windows  on  the  street,  shall  bring  at  last 
wide,  rested  thoughts  to  us.  As  we  go 
by,  we  shall  think  of  the  machines  every- 
where, spelling  freedom  and  joy  around 
the  earth. 


97 


I 


IV 

The  Skilled  Labor  of  the  Poor 

T  is  not  denied  that,  under  a  partial- 
rotary  system — the  allowance  of  part 
time  for  doing  other  men's  work — there 
would  be  a  falling  off  in  quantity  and 
quality  of  work  at  first,  but  it  is  believed 
that  whatever  a  factory  may  lose  tempo- 
rarily by  having  the  employees  who  desire 
it,  apprentices  part  of  the  time,  it  will  gain 
many  times  over  by  bringing  fresh  and 
creative  minds  every  day  of  the  year,  and 
a  great  many  of  them,  to  bear  upon  old 
difficulties,  minds  that  suggest  methods 
and  think  of  things,  out  of  their  very 
ignorance,  which  never  have  been  thought 
of  before. 

It  is  not  denied  that  a  superintendent 
who  carries  out  this  policy  will  have  to 
begin  slowly  and  perhaps  with  all  against 
him  at  first.  But  he  can  at  least  begin 


by  making  sure  of  the  fresh  young  men,  The  Skilled 

Labc 
Poor 


and  of  those  who  have  kept  fresh,  and  who     a  ° 


have  kept  growing  among  the  older  ones. 
Gradually  when  the  whole  soul  of  the 
business  is  seen  by  all  to  be  turning  on  it 
—  upon  the  daily  discovery,  developing, 
and  sorting  out  of  men,  the  whole  factory 
will  respond  to  it.  Instead  of  the  super- 
intendent's problem  being  what  it  is  now, 
how  to  defend  the  stronger  men  from  the 
weak,  and  the  men  who  can  work,  and 
want  to  work,  from  those  who  do  not,  the 
problem  will  be  inverted  —  will  be  one  of 
getting  the  strong  to  divide  with  the  weak, 
as  they  grow  stronger,  until  all  the  weak 
are  drawn  in  with  them,  and  all  work  to- 
gether. If  the  employers  are  voluntarily 
and  habitually  generous,  if  they  make 
common  cause  with  their  best  men,  the  best 
men  will  make  common  cause  with  the  men 
below  and  the  whole  factory  will  be  keyed 
to  a  new  spirit. 

It  is  by  no  means  claimed  that  a  partial- 
rotary  system  of  employment  will  make 

99 


inspired  all  machinists  inventors.  But  it  will  nat- 
urally and  incidentally  make  a  few  men 
inventors,  and  by  giving  every  man  a 
chance,  and  a  good  many  kinds  of  chance, 
it  will  discover  which  those  few  are,  and 
more  of  them.  It  will  be  generally  rec- 
ognized by  all,  that  a  soul  in  a  machine 
shop  is  as  valuable  as  anywhere  else.  The 
chief  attribute  of  the  workman's  soul  is 
his  imagination,  the  mind's  power  of  visit- 
ing around  in  things,  and  of  putting  them 
together.  To  say  that  a  man  with  an 
imagination  in  a  machine  shop  is  worth 
his  weight  in  gold,  is  to  put  it  mildly.  It 
is  the  very  essence  of  a  machine  shop,  of 
all  places  in  the  world,  that  the  skilled 
labor  of  the  hands  is  reduced  to  its  lowest 
terms  and  the  skilled  labor  of  the  mind 
or  soul  is  all  that  is  left,  and  wins  the 
highest  possible  premium.  A  man  in  a 
machine  shop  who  has  an  imagination 
does  his  thinking  in  armies.  Every 
machine  he  thinks  of  is  a  crowd.  Great 
buildings  full  of  din  and  might  build 


themselves  with  a  thought,  and  cities  and  The  Skilled 

fortunes  flock  to  him.     To  be  spiritual  in       °r  of  the 

a  factory,  to  be  spiritual  with  raw  material 

like  machines,  to  have  a  thought  that  is 

like  miles  of  men  in  a  minute,  to  put  two 

bits  of  steel  together  with  an  echo  around 

the  world  —  it  is  incredible  that  anyone 

could  ever  have  had  the  idea  that  a  man 

who  works  in  a  machine  shop  cannot  have 

a  soul  and  cannot  work  in  the  spirit  of  the 

artist. 

The  inspired  millionaire  is  through  with 
it.  He  is  going  to  believe  that  the  more 
spirit  a  factory-hand  has  in  proportion  to 
the  amount  of  matter  in  him,  the  more 
matter  he  can  get  hold  of  both  for  himself 
and  for  everybody  else.  He  is  going  to 
believe  that  the  more  spiritual  a  factory 
is,  the  more  it  emphasizes  spirit  and  pays 
for  it,  the  bigger  material  success  it  will 
make,  and  the  longer  it  will  make  it.  He 
is  going  to  believe  that  the  more  a  machine 
shop  treats  its  men  like  machines,  the  more 
machines  it  has,  with  nothing  but  ma- 

101 


inspired       chines  tending  them,  at  just  so  many  more 

Millionaires         .    .       ,          . .  ,  „ 

points  does  it  expose  itself.  A  half-alive 
machine  shop  cannot  succeed  any  more 
than  a  half -alive  anything  else.  The 
supreme  irreverence,  and  master-stupid- 
ity and  infidelity  of  the  present  age  is 
the  idea  that  it  can  —  the  idea  that  ma- 
chines, the  things  we  do  our  living  with  — 
are  not  meant  to  be  filled  with  life.  It  is 
almost  a  demonstrable  fact  that  most  of 
the  industrial  evils,  and  nearly  all  of  the 
social  and  religious  ones  in  this  age  of 
machines,  can  be  traced  to  the  idea  that 
in  some  mysterious  and  hopeless  manner 
God  has  left  a  bare  spot  in  creation  and 
that  the  men  who  work  with  machines  do 
not  need  to  have  souls,  and  that  if  they  do 
need  them,  they  cannot  have  them. 

Incidentally,  the  whole  question  of 
modern  civilization  is  at  stake  in  establish- 
ing a  belief  in  this  principle,  in  getting 
millionaire  manufacturers  who  will  see 
that  they  are  compelled  to  employ  the 
best  men,  with  the  best  minds  that  this 


country  can  produce,  millionaires  who  will  The  Skilled 
want  everyone  to  know  that  they  are  es-  °r< 
tablishing  new  conditions  among  the  ma- 
chines, who  will  advertise  that  the  very 
men  that  factories,  under  conditions  that 
now  exist,  cannot  hire,  are  the  men  that 
they  are  trying  to  get,  that  the  most  im- 
portant part  of  their  machinery  to  them  is 
the  live  part  of  it  —  the  men  in  it.  It  is 
the  soul  of  the  business  that  if  machinery 
is  good  machinery  it  will  have  to  be  alive 
all  through. 

The  first  millionaire  who  will  really  be- 
lieve that  a  factory  can  only  be  a  material 
success  by  being  a  spiritual  one,  who  will 
put  up  his  fortune  on  it,  who  will  make  a 
sublime  wager  for  modern  life,  and  who 
will  attract  men  from  all  parts  of  the 
world  and  all  walks  of  life  to  help  him 
carry  it  out,  will  turn  the  whole  modern 
world  around.  When  one  millionaire  has 
done  it,  the  rest  will  follow,  will  come  to 
see  by  experiment,  by  comparison,  that  if 
men  in  a  factory  are  under  the  machines 
103 


inspired  in  it,  it  is  merely  a  matter  of  time  when 
the  machines  and  the  men  will  go  down 
together.  When  a  manufacturing  busi- 
ness fails,  the  chances  are  nine  out  of  ten 
that  it  is  because  some  other  manufactur- 
ing company  has  managed  to  be  spiritual 
at  a  vital  point,  that  is, —  to  have  an  em- 
ployee who  thought  of  something.  Men 
were  not  meant  to  be  under  machines. 
Everyone  is  going  to  see,  when  it  has  been 
given  one  good,  decisive  trial,  that  neither 
the  men  nor  the  machines  can  really  be 
made  to  work  in  that  way  —  except  for  a 
little  while.  There  will  be  nothing  a  mill- 
ionaire will  dread  more  than  these  slaves 
and  cowards  and  drudges  he  has  made,  and 
that  he  has  scattered  among  his  machines. 
He  knows  that  it  is  a  mere  matter  of  time, 
when  some  factory  in  which  men  are 
allowed  to  think  will  get  a  machine  that 
will  ruin  his. 

It  already  looks  as  if  the  time  were  not 
far  off  when  machines  will  be  thought  of 
so  fast  in  machine  shops  that  think,  that 
104 


all  others  will  cease  to  exist.  One  can  The  Skilled 
almost  see  the  day  —  it  is  merely  around  P*0° r  ' 
the  corner  of  the  world,  I  think  —  when 
all  of  these  under-the-dollar  millionaires 
and  these  under-machine  men,  and  men- 
machines  will  be  wiped  from  the  face  of 
the  earth.  It  would  be  hard  to  find  an 
empty  or  silent  mill  anywhere,  even  to- 
day, which  in  one  way  or  another,  does 
not  bear  witness  to  this  coming  of  the 
truth.  It  is  silent  and  empty  because 
someone,  somewhere  else,  has  thought  of 
something. 


105 


The  Skilled  Labor  of  the  Rich 

IT  is  W.  B.  Yeats  who  has  said,  in  speak- 
ing of  poets  as  a  class,  "  We  see  the 
perfect  more  than  others,  but  we  must  find 
the  passions  among  the  people."  It  is 
this  finding  the  passion  among  the  people 
which  makes  me  hopeful  about  million- 
aires. If  the  passion  for  making  money 
is  the  passion  that  we  actually  have  in 
America,  the  next  vision  for  us  is  going 
to  be  some  way  of  making  what  we  actu- 
ally have  beautiful.  The  beauty  that 
builds  the  destiny  of  a  nation  always  lies 
next  neighbor  to  its  greatest  gift.  If 
it  is  true  that  wealth  is  our  greatest  gift 
in  America,  —  our  vision,  —  it  is  merely 
a  matter  of  time  when  America  is  going  to 
show  that  wealth  is  full  of  revelation,  and 
creativeness,  and  beauty,  that  it  is  holding 
in  its  hand  the  liberties  of  a  world. 
1 06 


It  is  already  obvious  that  the  American  The  Skilled 


people  have  a  great  latent,  obstinate  faith 
in  rich  men  and  in  what  they  can  do  and 
be.  They  are  already  picking  out  all  over 
the  country,  semi-inspired  millionaires. 
They  have  their  eyes  upon  them  every- 
where. They  have  no  inherent  pessim- 
ism or  distrust  in  money  as  money.  It 
was  only  a  year  or  so  ago  that  it  was  sug- 
gested by  the  whole  State  of  Massachu- 
setts in  a  rather  big  voice  at  the  polls,  that 
finding  fault  with  a  millionaire  for  his 
money  is  gone  by.  We  joined  together 
almost  without  knowing  it,  out  of  all 
parties,  and  suddenly  and  quietly  on 
election  day  made  W.  L.  Douglas  Gov- 
ernor of  Massachusetts  because  he  is  rich 
and  because  we  are  all  glad  of  it. 

The  same  men  on  the  same  day,  who 
were  electing  a  Republican  President  by 
an  enormous  majority,  elected  a  demo- 
cratic governor  by  another  enormous 
majority  for  no  other  reason  that 
anyone  can  find  out,  than  that  W. 
107 


inspired       L.  Douglas   seemed   to  be   a  man  who 

Millionaires  111  i 

could  make  money  and  men  and  shoes 
together.  If  this  could  be  done  and  there 
was  a  man  in  the  State  who  had  proved 
that  it  could  be  done,  all  that  seemed  to  be 
needed  was  pointing.  And  after  care- 
fully seeing  to  it  that  the  President  was 
elected,  the  people  suddenly  dropped 
everything  else  at  the  bare  thought  that 
there  could  be  such  a  man  in  the  State, 
and  in  a  few  hours  made  him  Governor  of 
Massachusetts.  There  was  not  a  man 
anywhere,  out  of  all  the  men  of  all  parties 
who  voted  for  Mr.  Douglas,  who  seemed 
to  object  to  him  for  being  a  millionaire. 
Without  his  money  nobody  would  have 
noticed  him.  And  probably  without  Mr. 
Douglas  nobody  would  have  noticed  the 
money.  It  seemed  to  be  the  combination. 
A  fortune  and  a  human  being  lying 
alongside  each  other,  all  interpenetrated 
with  each  other,  seemed  interesting  to  the 
people  and  to  the  point.  The  people 
seemed  to  like  Mr.  Douglas's  money. 

108 


The  more  money  he  had,  the  more  his  The  Skilled 
money  meant;  and  the  more  things  they  R*ch°r 
kept  hearing  about  him  the  more  money 
they  wanted  him  to  have.    Every  dollar  of 
it  was  the  autobiography  of  a  kind  of  man 
that  rich  men  and  labor  unions  had  been 
saying  for  decades  could  not  exist. 

What  the  situation  amounted  to,  as  it 
has  seemed  to  me,  was  simply  this.  A 
man  that  everybody  had  said  could  not 
exist  had  suddenly  existed.  And  some- 
thing had  to  be  done  about  it.  So  he  was 
made  Governor  of  Massachusetts. 

The  real  secret  of  the  people,  one  is  in- 
clined to  think,  in  what  the  papers  had 
characterized  as  an  altogether  unheralded 
and  noiseless  revolution,  was  the  sudden 
hopefulness  that  came  to  them  when  they 
heard  that  Mr.  Douglas  might  be  good 
enough  to  be  rich.  I  have  no  personal 
knowledge  of  Mr.  Douglas  and  no  very 
definite  conviction  as  to  whether  this  is 
true  or  not.  He  may  be  the  merest  glim- 
mer toward  the  inspired  millionaire,  but 
109 


inspired  the  overwhelming  way  in  which  the  people 
8  believed  in  the  glimmer,  and  stood  up  and 
let  their  faith  be  counted,  was  to  me  an 
event  of  profound  and  national  impor- 
tance. It  was  like  an  interpretation,  a 
reading  of  the  next  one  hundred  years. 

I  had  been  plodding  down  my  own  little 
road  of  belief  alone,  I  thought,  or  almost 
alone.  Suddenly  I  felt  a  great  multitude 
—  silently  and  out  of  sight  —  tramping 
beside  me.  I  had  been  told  at  every  cross- 
road that  our  working  men  were  mean- 
spirited,  that  they  were  dull  and  small 
men,  seeing  only  their  own  side,  and 
bitter  against  the  rich.  Then  sud- 
denly—  I  heard,  them  —  it  was  like 
a  mighty  shout,  the  voice  of  a  great  com- 
pany as  one  man,  out  there  in  the 
dark.  It  was  proclaimed  upon  the  house- 
tops, the  next  morning,  what  was  really  in 
their  hearts. 


CLOUDS  THE  SIZE  OF  A  MAN'S  HAND 

And  Elijah  went  up  to  the  top  of  Carmel,  and  he 
cast  himself  down  upon  the  earth  and  put  his  face  between 
his  hands.  And  he  said  to  his  servant,  go  up  now,  and 
look  toward  the  sea.  And  he  went  up  and  looked  and 
said  there  is  nothing. 

And  it  came  to  pass  at  the  seventh  time,  that  he  said. 
Behold  there  ariseth  a  little  cloud  out  of  the  sea  like  a 
man's  hand." 


The  Lack  of  Conveniences  for  Million- . 
aires 

A  GOOD  many  thoughtful  people 
have  been  trying  to  find  of  late 
some  slight  position,  or  opening  for  mil- 
lionaires in  this  country.  There  doesn't 
seem  to  be  anything.  One  can  hardly  go 
anywhere  in  the  United  States  the  last 
few  years  without  seeing  millionaires 
standing  in  rows  —  trying  to  get  some- 
thing to  do.  Sometimes  one  sees  hun- 
dreds of  them  waiting  patiently  —  these 
plain  humdrum  millionaires  we  run  to  in 
America,  waiting  in  all  the  cities  of  the 
world  —  Paris,  Rome,  Lucerne  —  even  in 
New  York.  But  nothing  comes  of  it. 

As  far  as  one  can  see  with  the  naked 
eye,  the  one  single  position  in  the  country 
that  is  vacant  just  now  is  that  of  in- 
spired millionaire. 

"3 


inspired          Those  of  us  who  hold  to  the  conviction 

Millionaires    .-,          , ,  ...  n    .          .       . 

that  the  position  of  inspired  millionaire 
in  this  country  is  somehow  going  to  be 
filled,  are  not  saying  that  there  is  going 
to  be  anything  precipitate  about  it.  We 
do  not  count  on  the  inspired  millionaire's 
coming  like  a  miracle  out  of  the  sky,  or  as 
a  great,  sudden  apocalyptic  character 
looming  up  in  Wall  Street,  or  in  the  life 
of  this  modern  world.  A  great  many 
millionaires  will  be  wasted  probably  ex- 
perimenting. We  will  have,  as  always, 
millionaires  who  do  not  intend  to  be  in- 
spired if  they  can  help  it,  or  who  want  to 
be  inspired  in  some  little  private,  amusing 
way  of  their  own;  but  there  is  reason  to 
believe  we  are  going  to  have  the  inspired 
millionaire,  because  it  cannot  be  helped. 
The  other  kinds  of  millionaires  will  be 
tried  and  they  will  not  work. 

The  millionaires  are  being  driven  to  it. 
This  is  the  first  cloud  the  size  of  a  man's 
hand. 

When  our  typical  American  man  of 
114 


wealth  in  the  course  of  his  natural  devel-  The  Lack  of 

i    ,  .1  •    ,    Conveniences 

opment  comes,  sooner  or  later,  to  the  point  for  Millionaires 
where  he  feels  that  he  can  afford  to  face 
the  problem  of  living  instead  of  getting 
a  living,  the  idea  of  millionaire  he  most 
naturally  attempts  is  the  imported  or  Eu- 
ropean idea,  the  gentleman  of  leisure,  the 
enjoyer  of  the  world,  who  seeks  to  benefit 
and  refine  it  by  the  way  he  spends  his 
money,  by  the  ennobling  effect  of  his 
pleasures. 

It  may  be  a  remarkable  fact,  but  it 
looks  like  a  rather  true  one,  that  an  inspired 
millionaire,  in  this  European  sense,  viz,  a 
man  who  sets  out  with  a  great  capacity 
for  giving  and  receiving  joy  in  the  world, 
cannot  find  anything  to  do  in  it  —  that  is, 
taking  things  as  they  are  and  without 
touching  or  changing  them  he  cannot  find 
anything  to  do  in  it.  The  world  is  not 
arranged  for  inspired  millionaires.  If  a 
millionaire  wants  to  be  inspired  in  it,  even 
if  he  wants  to  be  amused  in  it,  he  finds  he 
will  have  to  arrange  it  himself.  What  is 
115 


inspired  there,  f  or  instance,  a  really  inspired  mil- 
8  lionaire  can  do  to  amuse  himself  after  din- 
ner? Of  course,  if  he  could  spend  a 
night  in  the  whole  world  at  once,  ring  up 
any  continent  he  has  a  mind  to,  for  the 
evening,  attend  opera  in  Berlin,  London, 
San  Francisco,  or  Hong  Kong,  he  might 
find  something  inspired  being  said  or  sung 
somewhere  and  could  drop  in  for  a  while; 
but  the  arrangements  already  made  in  the 
world  for  an  inspired  millionaire  at  any 
given  time  or  place  in  it,  any  place  that 
can  be  reached  after  dinner,  are  pitiable 
enough.  There  is  hardly  any  part  of  the 
land  or  any  day  of  the  year  in  which  it  is 
not  easier  to  get  a  few  dollars'  worth  of 
work  than  it  is  to  get  a  million  dollars' 
worth  of  play.  He  tries  everything  he 
can  think  of,  that  people  do  after  dinner, 
and  that  they  seem  to  think  is  play  —  the 
picture  gallery,  the  concert,  the  lecture, 
and  the  club,  and  the  ball,  and  the  theater. 
But  he  soon  finds  that  the  things  that  have 
creative  joy  in  them  —  that  is,  millions  of 

116 


dollars'  worth  of  joy  —  are  not  to  be  had.  The  Lack  of 

He  finds  they  are  not  being  made.    No 

one  can  get  joy  enough  to  put  into  them. 

So,  generally,  in  sheer  desperation  he  thinks 

at  last  he  will  stay  at  home  and  read.    He 

thinks  he  will  read  down  to  the  heart  of  the 

world  in  its  latest  books.    He  will  see  what 

kind  of  a  world  it  really  is  under  the  noise, 

and  what  it  is  really  thinking,  and  feeling, 

and  expecting.     After  a   few  evenings 

spent  in  this  way  he  cannot  but  come  to 

two   conclusions.     There   are   two   facts 

that  face  him  at  every  turn: 

First.  The  immeasurable  and  unprece- 
dented number  of  men  devoting  their  en- 
tire time  to  literature  and  the  arts. 

Second.  The  immeasurable  and  un- 
precedented number  of  probabilities, 
judging  from  their  work,  that  there  is 
not  a  single  great,  lasting,  irreplaceable 
artist  among  them  all.  He  rather  won- 
ders at  this  at  first.  "  Why  is  it,"  he 
thinks,  "  that  with  all  our  improvements, 
our  civilization,  with  all  our  education,  — 
Plato  and  Homer  hold  on  so?  " 
117 


inspired          If  all  the  artists  of  the  world  in  the 

Millionaires  «  T         -,    -^^^ 

present  year  of  our  Lord,  1908,  were  put 
together  in  a  single  place  all  by  themselves, 
they  would  make  a  city  a  deal  larger  than 
Athens  was,  with  her  processional  of  im- 
mortals down  the  years ;  and  if  all  the  men 
and  women  who  are  devoting  their  entire 
time  to  writing  were  gathered  together  — 
quarantined  on  an  island  in  the  sea,  Mada- 
gascar, for  instance  —  these  same  writers, 
writing  —  all  of  them  writing,  all  of  the 
time,  and  writing,  and  still  writing,  the 
scratching  of  their  pens  rising  higher  and 
higher,  and  sounding  far  and  faint  to  us, 
like  some  forgotten  thing  across  the  surges 
of  the  sea  —  these  same  writers  would  con- 
stitute a  nation  all  by  themselves  as  large 
as  the  nation  in  Palestine  ever  was,  a  nation 
which,  with  very  few  persons  in  it  who 
could  read,  and  fewer  still  who  could 
write,  produced  several  immortal  journal- 
ists —  men  of  their  own  •  times,  called 
prophets  —  and  two  or  three  very  consid- 
erable poets,  one  of  whom  wrote  the  hymn- 

118 


book  of  three  thousand  years  and  another  The  Lack  of 
of  whom  made  the  first  rough  but  im- 
mortal  sketch  of  a  God  for  the  human 
heart,  and  told  the  news  as  though  it  hap- 
pened yesterday  of  a  Man  fifteen  hundred 
years  away.  Very  few  literary  men  or 
women  with  notebooks  and  typewriters 
could  have  been  found  about  David's 
court.  The  masterpieces  of  Isaiah,  de- 
livered largely  to  men  who  could  not  read, 
were  taken  apparently  from  notes  of  ex- 
temporaneous addresses  here  and  there, 
and  the  number  of  artists  that  could  be 
found  in  the  whole  length  and  breadth  of 
Palestine  in  that  day  of  masterpieces 
could  have  met  together  in  a  hall  bedroom 
without  crowding  each  other.  The  civil- 
ization in  which  we  are  living  to-day  is  a 
civilization  that  has  conventions  of  artists 
in  auditoriums,  and  mass  meetings  of 
men  who  do  nothing  but  write.  It  is  a 
civilization  which  has  scores  of  schools  of 
painting  and  scores  of  universities  of 
music,  with  fullest  courses  and  the  like. 
119 


inspired  It  is  B,  civilization  which  has  hundreds  of 
s  thousands  of  people  engaged  in  master- 
ing the  footnotes  of  Shakespeare  and 
studying  the  participles  of  Homer;  which 
has  its  library  on  Dante,  its  miles  of  ex- 
plaining the  masterpieces  of  the  Hebrews, 
and  its  acres  of  analysis  of  the  master- 
pieces of  Greece,  which  has  scores 
of  Chairs  that  tell  men  in  college 
how  to  be  geniuses,  and  summer 
schools  that  tell  how  other  men  have 
been  geniuses;  which  has  clubs  to  be 
men  of  genius  in,  and  clubs  for  women  to 
be  women  of  genius  in;  which  has  two 
or  three  magazines  on  how  to  be  an 
author;  which  has  two  or  three  hun- 
dred magazines  showing  what  it  is  sup- 
posed an  author  ought  to  be,  and  three 
or  four  thousand  journals  showing  what 
an  author  ought  not  to  be, —  is  a  civiliza- 
tion that  (with  one  exception  perhaps) 
has  not  a  single  colossal  living  artist  of 
its  own. 

Gradually,  as  the  inspired  millionaire 


sits  down  night  after  night  and  looks  over  The  Lack  of 
these  writers  and  tries  to  get  interested  in 
them,  he  gets  interested  in  what  is  the 
matter  with  them.  He  puts  the  question 
—  "  Why  is  it  that  the  more  literary  men 
we  have  the  less  our  chances  seem  to  be  of 
ever  having  a  literature? "  He  soon 
finds  himself  facing  the  fact  that  this 
modern  literature  with  all  its  literary  look, 
its  artistic  ingeniousness,  its  gilt,  all  its 
poor,  sad  little  trappings  of  joy  about  it, 
is  not  really  a  literature  at  all,  has  not  a 
single  great  structural  necessary  joy  in 
it,  lifting  itself  up,  from  world's  end  to 
world's  end.  Perhaps  the  modern  liter- 
ary world  is  not  great  because  it  is  not  real 
and  is  not  quite  honest.  Instead  of  being 
a  real  literary  world,  it  is  a  vast  monoto- 
nous prairie  of  self-support.  All  these 
hordes  of  writers,  these  long  processions 
or  caravans  of  authors,  if  they  were  to  put 
all  their  creative  joy  in  their  work  to- 
gether, and  pile  it  up  in  one  place  for  an 
inspired  millionaire  after  dinner,  would 

121 


inspired  not  amuse  him  for  five  minutes.  The  whole 
spectacle  of  modern  literature  is  a  weari- 
ness to  him  —  these  rows  of  dreary  hired- 
men  with  pens,  timid  and  expedient,  and 
rigidly  self -suppressed,  with  their  roofed- 
in,  practical  minds  —  these  rows  of  timid 
publishers  tiptoeing  along  before  the  pub- 
lic eye,  their  millions  of  dollars  behind 
them,  all  in  a  kind  of  anxious  literary 
hush.  He  sees  through  it  all  as  he  sits 
in  his  library.  He  will  have  nothing  to 
do  with  it.  Even  an  uninspired  million- 
aire would  not.  It  was  only  the  other 
day  that  one  of  them,  when  he 
wanted  to  do  something  intellectual-look- 
ing (buy  something  he  thought  would  be 
really  literary),  bought  a  hundred-and- 
thirty-thousand-dollar  set  of  Dickens. 
Forty  thousand  living  authors  looked  on 
in  silence. 

The  next  thing  that  happens  after  the 
inspired  millionaire  has  given  up  encour- 
aging forty  thousand  living  authors  after 
dinner,  is  generally  one  more  struggle 


to  be  amused  with  some  of  the  other  things  The  Lack  of 
that  people  try  at  first,  in  modern  life,  and 
that  look  amusing  until  they  are  found 
out.     He  soon  comes  down  to  hardpan 
in  all  of  them  and  faces  a  truth. 

In  a  country  where  millions  of  peo- 
ple, nearly  all  of  the  people,  are  hired 
by  the  week  not  to  have  any  joy,  that  is, 
to  keep  their  ideals  and  their  work  apart, 
where  even  the  leading  men  — the  men 
one  knows  —  are  drawing  salaries  for  not- 
living,  inspired  amusements  are  not  to  be 
looked  for.  A  man's  joy  in  his  work  is 
the  expressing  of  his  individual  self  in  it. 
If  he  is  doing  his  work  under  conditions 
which  do  not  recognize  individual  selves 
in  men,  and  best  selves  in  them,  his  work 
can  have  no  joy  in  it.  A  man  who  is 
daily  separated  in  his  work  from  his  ut- 
most inspired  self  soon  comes  to  believe 
that  he  was  never  meant  to  have  one.  He 
not  only  believes  this,  but  he  believes  that 
it  is  the  very  nature  of  work  not  to  have 
inspiration  in  it.  He  tries  to  put  his  in- 

143 


inspired  spiration  into  playing  after  his  work  is 
done.  Then  comes  the  fact  which  is  hard- 
est to  face  of  all,  especially  if  a  nation 
has  to  face  it.  People  who  spend  nearly 
all  of  their  time  in  doing  their  work  with- 
out inspiration,  have  very  little  inspiration 
left  to  do  their  playing  with.  Not  having 
inspiration  themselves,  they  do  not  know 
it  when  they  see  it  in  others.  The  actors 
and  the  plays  that  have  creative  fire  or 
joy  in  them  do  not  become  known  among 
such  a  people.  They  cannot  seem  to  burn 
their  way  through  to  those  who  might 
want  them.  Always  this  same  great 
Damp  Wall  of  Public,  —  this  same  dear 
anxious,  plodding,  art-proof,  Public.  It 
is  a  world  in  which  the  very  playhouses 
work. 

If  the  millionaire  goes  about  hopefully 
from  one  country  to  another  feeling  that 
great  actors  may  yet  be  found,  actors  who 
are  interested  in  supporting  great  plays, 
he  finds  nothing  but  small  actors  — 
crowds  of  them  —  supporting  themselves. 
124 


A  getting-a-living  public  prefers  getting-  The  Lack  of 

T    •  Ti     i  •  Conveniences 

a-hving  actors.  It  does  not  miss  any-  for  Millionaires 
thing  in  them.  The  more  an  actor  acts 
to  make  money  out  of  people  of  this 
kind,  and  the  more  money  he  makes  out  of 
them,  the  more  they  are  impressed,  and 
the  more  they  flock  to  hear  him.  The  in- 
spired millionaire  soon  learns  that  if  he 
wants  to  hear  a  great  actor,  he  must  make 
one,  and  that  after  he  has  made  him,  he 
must  make  a  public  for  him.  The  same 
is  true  not  only  of  the  art  of  acting,  but 
of  every  other  art  which,  by  its  nature,  is 
intended  to  give  joy  and  to  be  the  expres- 
sion of  joy  that  belongs  to  life.  Hard- 
working people  have  hard-working  arts. 
If  an  inspired  millionaire  could  go  to  all 
of  the  theaters  in  America  at  once  —  go  to 
them  in  one  night  —  is  there  anyone  who 
really  supposes,  for  a  single  moment,  he 
could  get  his  money's  worth]  .  .  . 
Herds  of  tired  faces  .  .  .  thousands 
of  herds  of  tired  and  callous  faces  .  .  . 
the  flare  of  the  footlights  .  .  .  one 

1*5 


inspired       set  of  tired  faces  grimacing  at  joy  out  of 

Millionaires  ,  Al  «..,,. 

empty  hearts  to  another  set  of  tired  faces. 

.  .  .  Nothing  more  pathetic,  more 
full  of  terror,  and  sadness,  and  prophecy, 
could  possibly  be  conceived  than  The 
Spectacle  of  Audiences  —  the  panorama 
for  a  single  night  of  the  American  people 
at  its  joys.  Joy  is  not  in  us.  We  have 
parted  from  its  spirit.  And  when  hard- 
worked  people,  engaged  in  supporting 
themselves  all  day,  gather  together  and 
watch  some  more  hard- worked  people  sup- 
porting themselves  all  night,  we  call  it  an 
amusement. 

With  rare  exceptions  the  only  form  of 
public  entertainment  that  can  be  said  to 
be  open  to  the  average  man  nowadays  — 
the  man  who  is  trying  to  master  the  prob- 
lem of  self-support  —  is  to  go  and  watch 
some  other  man  trying  to  master  it;  and 
when  this  average  man  has  mastered  it,  be- 
comes an  average  millionaire,  for  instance 
—  perchance  an  inspired  millionaire  —  his 
last  condition  is  no  better  than  his  first. 


He  may  have  a  theory  that  he  does  not  The  Lack  of 
need  to  keep  on  getting  a  living  any 
longer,  but  in  a  getting-a-living  world  he 
is  practically  compelled  to  keep  on  getting 
a  living,  whether  he  wants  to  or  not. 

He  cannot  find  anything  else  to  do.  He 
cannot  find  amusements  that  are  worth 
spending  his  money  on.  So  he  spends  it 
on  more  work,  and  as  spending  money  on 
more  work  (reinvesting  it)  merely  means 
having  more  money  to  spend  on  amuse- 
ments he  cannot  get,  the  longer  a  million- 
aire finds  himself  holding  on  to  life  the 
smaller  his  chance  seems  to  be  of  doing 
any  living  in  it.  Even  the  kingdom  of 
this  world  is  shut  against  him.  It  looks 
sometimes  as  if  the  saying  of  Scripture: 
"  It  is  easier  for  a  camel  to  go  through  a 
needle's  eye  than  for  a  rich  man  to  enter 
the  Kingdom  "  must  have  meant  that  it 
was  no  object  to  the  camel  —  going 
through  the  needle's  eye  —  even  if  he 
could.  There  is  no  denying  that  having 
great  means  to  spend  in  the  next  world  — 
127 


inspired  with  the  best  people  to  spend  it  with  — 
8  might  be  made  to  mean  something,  but 
the  more  a  man  has  money  in  this  one,  the 
more  he  works  on  the  project  of  living 
with  his  money  instead  of  getting  a  liv- 
ing with  it,  the  more  he  is  discouraged. 

Whichever  way  he  turns  in  human  soci- 
ety, where,  at  first  thought,  at  least,  one 
would  think  beauty,  and  joy,  and  rest 
might  be,  he  finds  that  they  are  not ;  or  if 
they  are,  he  finds  he  cannot  get  at  them, 
or  that  they  cannot  get  at  him.  The  get- 
ting-a-living  crowds  are  in  the  way. 
They  are  getting  a  living.  They  are 
against  every  man  who  is  not  get- 
ting a  living.  They  want  their  get- 
ting-a-living  things.  The  world  has  been 
made  convenient  for  their  getting  them. 
There  is  nothing  anywhere  in  modern  life 
but  this  same  ceaseless  spectacle  —  the 
spectacle  of  the  Arts  being  tamely  led 
around  by  a  host  of  pleasant  married 
women,  white-aproned  nurses,  and  babies 
in  go-carts.  It  is  a  spectacle  of  The  True 
128 


and  The  Beautiful,  and  The  Good  being  The  Lack  of 

-,    !  i  Conveniences 

ground  between  our  two  great  modern  for  Millionaires 
millstones,  The  Home  and  The  Office. 

To  one  who  loves  his  kind,  and  watches 
them,  who  loves  to  see  men  doing  their 
thinking  and  living  in  long  spans  like 
those  that  have  gone  before  us,  there 
seems  to  be  something  a  little  fussy  and 
effeminate  about  our  modern  life.  One 
can  only  watch  the  babies  governing  their 
mothers,  in  it,  and  the  mothers  governing 
the  fathers,  and  the  fathers  tramping 
down  to  the  office.  And  even  the  office 
—  even  business,  which  might  seem  to  be 
heroic,  and  artistic,  and  self -expressive  in 
a  day  like  this,  if  anything  is  — is  gov- 
erned by  a  set  of  anonymous,  vague  mil- 
lionaires, who  are  literally  ordering  the 
whole  planet  around  from  morning  till 
night  —  for  a  few  dollars.  There  is  get- 
ting to  be  hardly  a  man  on  it  with  whom 
to  associate  —  least  of  all  artists.  Not 
that  an  inspired  millionaire  would  not  like 
to  associate  with  them.  He  would  —  and 


inspired  with  almost  anybody  —  but  they  all  have 
8  watches  in  their  hands  when  he  tries  to. 
All  their  time  is  hired  by  somebody  else. 

The  result  is,  that  the  more  he  thinks 
about  it,  and  the  more  he  tries  to  be 
amused  after  dinner,  the  more  serious  he 
gets.  He  drifts  to  the  edge  of  The  Preci- 
pice and  looks  down. 

The  Precipice  is  this:  Inspired  things 
can  only  be  done  by  inspired  men,  by  men 
who  take  time  to  live  inspired  lives.  An 
inspired  millionaire,  a  man  with  a  great 
capacity  for  giving  and  receiving  joy  in 
him,  cannot  help  becoming  a  philanthro- 
pist. He  finds  that  he  cannot  even  be  self- 
ish in  a  world  like  this  without  having 
better-made  men  and  women  around  him 
to  be  selfish  with.  He  cannot  find  the 
men  and  women.  The  only  thing  an  in- 
spired millionaire  can  do  is  to  make  them. 
He  becomes  a  philanthropist  or  man- 
maker  in  self-defense.  He  comes  sooner 
or  later  to  but  one  object  in  the  world, 
namely,  going  about,  picking  out  the  men 
130 


in  it,  in  all  the  arts,  in  all  mechanics,  The  Lack  of 
machine  shops,  libraries,  and  laboratories, 
and  everywhere,  who  have  visions,  and  in- 
ventions, and  ideals  which  they  are  mak- 
ing sacrifices  to  put  into  their  labor  — and 
giving  them  a  chance  to  do  it. 

This  is  his  program.  The  first  thing 
that  happens  to  his  program  is  that  he 
slowly  learns  that  man-making  is  not  only 
the  most  expensive  amusement,  but  the 
most  lonesome  one  that  the  world  affords. 
We  all  wish  him  God-speed.  And  then 
we  get  in  his  way.  When  one  considers 
how  many  things  there  are  in  the  course 
of  his  life  a  millionaire  is  obliged  to  give 
up,  this  is  hard.  The  first  thing  he  does 
as  a  young  man  is  to  give  up  amusement 
in  order  to  make  money.  The  next  thing 
he  does  is  to  try  to  make  an  amusement 
out  of  making  the  money.  Then  he  has 
to  give  it  up.  Then  he  tries  to  make  an 
amusement  out  of  spending  the  money. 
He  has  to  give  this  up  also.  Then,  when, 
as  the  years  go  on,  the  truth  leaks  out,  and 
131 


inspired       he  learns  once  for  all  that  making  money 

Millionaires          •,  -,.  «     .,     „   .-, 

and  spending  money  are  both  failures  as 
amusements,  because  of  the  men  with 
whom  one  has  to  do  them,  and  he  takes  up 
at  last  with  the  amusement  of  making 
men,  he  finds  that  the  public  is  against 
him. 

We  approve  pleasantly  and  placidly 
enough  of  making  men,  but  everything 
we  do  makes  men  impossible.  We  are 
not  even  making  men  of  ourselves, —  most 
of  us.  We  have  not  time.  The  making 
of  men  is  a  peculiar  occupation  in  which  a 
man  could  be  expected  to  spend  his  time, 
and  is  left  to  women  and  ministers.  An  in- 
spired millionaire  soon  finds  that  he  can- 
not get  any  men  to  make.  Boys  want  to 
be  like  their  fathers,  and  their  fathers  are 
making  money.  The  government  is  in 
the  business  of  producing  conditions  in 
which  the  money  can  be  made.  The 
schools  and  colleges,  with  a  greater  or  less 
degree  of  candor,  are  in  the  business  of 
producing  the  men  who  can  make  it.  The 


Church  is  in  the  business  of  doing  as  well  The  Lack  of 

..,,.          .,  ill!       i       Conveniences 

as  it  can,  trickling  the  gospel  helplessly  for  Millionaires 
into  the  stream  that  sweeps  around  it  and 
away  with  it.  It  hopes  gently  that  men 
will  do  as  little  wrong  as  possible  in  get- 
ting their  money,  and  as  much  good  as 
possible  in  spending  it.  In  the  meantime 
it  takes  the  money  if  they  make  it,  and 
comforts  them  if  they  do  not.  They  need 
a  great  deal  of  comforting  if  they  do  not. 
The  man  who  has  a  million  dollars  in 
his  pockets  and  a  philanthropic  work  on 
his  hands  soon  finds  that,  so  far  as  his 
philanthropy  is  concerned,  he  is  one  of  the 
most  lonesome  and  helpless  objects  in  the 
the  world.  The  world  does  not  want  his 
philanthropy.  It  wants  his  million  dol- 
lars. It  does  not  even  want  to  hear  what 
he  has  to  say  about  his  philanthropy.  It 
wants  to  hear  how  he  got  his  million  dol- 
lars. If  there  is  a  particular  set  of  poor 
people  in  whom  he  is  interested,  the  best 
way  for  him  to  raise  money  for  them 
would  be  to  tell  other  poor  people  how  to 
133 


inspired  get  rich.  For  every  hundred  dol- 
lars he  could  raise  trying  to  inter- 
est the  world  in  his  charity,  by 
talking  about  it,  he  could  raise  thou- 
sands talking  about  himself.  If  he  were 
to  open  an  office  and  give  private  consul- 
tations, heart-to-heart  talks,  on  how  he 
supported  himself,  he  could  support  a 
dozen  charities  with  his  daily  fees.  Peo- 
ple are  not  interested  in  his  telling  them 
how  to  help  others.  They  want  to  be  told 
how  to  help  themselves.  He  finds  that 
he  is  held  in  esteem  and  is  considered  a 
useful  member  of  society  because  he  has 
helped  himself  the  most.  He  finds  that 
he  is  looked  upon  as  a  kind  of  hero  for 
having  done  it.  If  there  were  any  ar- 
rangement by  which  a  millionaire  could 
be  told  at  sight,  if  he  were  compelled  by 
law  to  wear  a  coat,  for  instance,  with  a 
dollar  sign  on  it  —  amount  specified  — 
there  is  scarcely  a  city  in  the  world  where 
he  would  not  be  followed  by  crowds  in 
the  street.  Even  as  it  is,  he  is  often  re- 
134 


minded  that  he  is  a  sight,  in  spite  of  him-  The  Lack  of 
self.     The  word  passes  around  if  he  en- 
ters  a  restaurant,  and  when  he  hides  in 
his  hotel  people  stand  in  line  to  see  his 
name  on  the  register. 

The  world  envies  him  for  one  thing, 
and  that  is  the  thing  it  never  forgets. 
Whichever  way  he  turns,  in  his  attempt 
to  carry  out  some  larger  design  for  the 
world,  he  finds  that  his  million  dollars 
are  in  the  way.  He  cannot  do  the  work 
alone  and  he  cannot  find  the  men  to  help 
him.  He  spends  nearly  all  his  time  in  dis- 
covering that  the  men  who  appear  to  help 
him  are  helping  themselves.  They  are 
not  the  same  men  with  him  that 
they  are  with  others.  They  are  po- 
larized by  his  money.  He  cannot  get 
at  men,  somehow,  as  they  are.  He 
finds  himself  defeated  at  every  point, 
either  by  his  own  million  dollars,  or  by 
some  one's  else  million  dollars,  or  by  some- 
one's else  desire  to  have  his  million  dollars. 
The  whole  getting-a-living  machine  of 
135 


inspired       modern  life  is  across  his  path.     If,  in  the 

Millionaires   ^^5^    Qf   hjs    WQrk>    fae    suggests    that 

other  people  give  money,  it  is  hinted  that 
he  has  money  of  his  own  to  give.  If  he 
tries  giving  his  own  money  to  others,  that 
they  may  stop  making  money,  perhaps, 
and  make  something  they  know  how  to 
make  better,  he  is  told  that  he  is  spoiling 
them,  that  he  is  a  pauperizer,  that  he  is 
breaking  down  the  foundation  of  society. 
Society  swears  by  the  shibboleth  of  self- 
support.  Self-support,  society  tells  its 
inspired  millionaires,  is  what  society  is  for. 
Every  man's  hand  is  against  him.  His 
words  may  not  be,  but  his  hand  is,  and 
everything  he  does  with  his  life  is.  Ex- 
cept in  his  evenings  and  holidays,  every- 
thing he  does  with  his  life  is  based  on  the 
belief  that  getting-a-living  is  living. 

When  the  millionaire  stops  to  think 
about  it,  he  remembers  that  when  he  was 
getting  his  million  dollars  he  believed  that 
getting-a-living  was  living  himself.  He 
finds  that  the  men  he  knows  around  him, 
136 


who  have  actually  tried  being  millionaires,  The  Lack  of 
believe  it  still,  —  most  of  them.  Those 
who  would  like  to  try  being  millionaires 
believe  it  —  at  least  they  would  like  to 
see  if  they  do.  The  result  is,  that  the 
majority  of  people  nowadays —  (1)  mil- 
lionaires who  are  still  getting  a  living,  (2) 
persons  who  are  getting  a  living  in  order 
to  be  millionaires  —  may  be  said  to  consti- 
tute, so  far  as  helping  the  world  is  con- 
cerned, the  dependent  and  pauper  classes 
of  society.  That  is  to  say,  they  are  de- 
pendent upon  getting  a  living  and  society 
can  expect  very  little  from  them  except 
their  getting  a  living.  Any  real  living 
that  may  be  done  in  the  world  will  have  to 
be  done  by  other  people,  and,  as  men  who 
are  really  living  their  lives  themselves,  are 
the  only  men  who  can  help  the  rest  of  the 
world  to  live,  all  persons  who  are  merely 
getting  a  living  must  be  counted  out,  in 
any  large  and  practical  scheme  of  world- 
lifting. 

The  one  logical  thing  that  is  left  for  a 
137 


inspired  man  to  do  who  has  a  million  dollars  in  his 
pocket  is  to  spend  it  in  getting  people  not 
to  want  it,  in  getting  them  to  love  their 
work  instead  of  their  wages.  The  most 
practical  way  the  rich  man  can  do  this  is 
to  ally  himself  in  all  places  and  in  all 
walks  of  life  with  the  men  who  are  artists. 
The  great  moral  adventure  of  making  a 
world  which  has  a  virile,  every-day,  all- 
day  belief  in  labor  and  the  inspiration  of 
labor  narrows  itself  down  to  two  kinds 
of  men,  rich  men  who  refuse  to  use  their 
money  merely  to  make  more  money,  and 
poor  men  who,  as  anyone  can  see  at  a 
glance,  do  not  even  need  to  be  rich  —  re- 
formed millionaires  and  artists.  In  gen- 
eral all  persons  in  all  employments  who 
love  making  a  perfect  thing  out  of  the 
thing  they  do,  more  than  making  money 
out  of  it,  may  be  called  artists,  whether 
they  are  millionaires  or  not.  In  society,  as 
at  present  constituted,  under  the  false  ma- 
chine-conditions that  now  obtain,  the  mil- 
lionaire finds  the  majority  of  men  putting 
138 


their  work  into  a  time  and  place  by  itself.  The  Lack  of 
Their  sole  reason  for  doing  their 
work  is  that  they  may  have  time  to 
play.  But  he  also  finds  hundreds 
of  other  men  in  these  same  machine- 
shops  who  have  the  point  of  view 
of  the  artist.  They  seem  to  have  been  so 
created  that  neither  work  nor  play  can  be 
got  out  of  them  in  the  ordinary  way. 
They  mix  up  the  words.  Unless  they 
can  do  their  work  perfectly  enough  to 
make  play  out  of  it,  they  do  not  do  it. 
Their  work  and  their  play,  alike,  both  fail 
to  interest  them  unless  they  are  in  the  act 
of  putting  them  together. 

All  persons  the  inspired  millionaire  can 
find  in  all  walks  of  life  who  have  the 
strength,  daring,  and  joy  in  them  to  play 
in  their  work,  to  make  their  work  self -ex- 
pressive work,  whatever  it  costs,  and  for 
lesser  wages  if  necessary,  all  persons  who 
insist  upon  putting  their  whole  selves  into 
their  work,  who  lay  the  emphasis  of  their 
joy  not  upon  their  evenings  and  their  days 
139 


inspired  off ,  but  upon  the  very  brunt  and  center  of 
their  living, —  all  such  persons  the  inspired 
millionaire  will  seek  out  and  gather  to- 
gether. He  will  let  his  money  take  sides 
with  their  souls  and  he  will  set  them  in  a 
large  place  and  give  them  their  tools  and 
let  them  work  their  will  upon  the  world. 
Then  a  new  world  will  begin  to  be  made. 


140 


II 

The  Millionaire  Who  Does  Not  Want  to 
be  Lonely 

A  MILLIONAIRE  is  a  helpless 
man,  wondering  how  he  can  possi- 
bly think  before  he  dies,  of  enough  beauti- 
ful, or  permanent  values  into  which  he 
can  put  his  money.  An  artist  is  a  help- 
less man  who  is  looking  for  enough  money 
into  which  he  can  put  his  values,  and  ma- 
terialize his  ideas.  To  be  a  millionaire  is 
to  have  so  much  matter  on  one's  hands 
that  one  cannot  possibly  in  one  short  life 
have  enough  spirit  to  go  around.  To  be 
an  artist  is  to  possess  so  much  of  the  ideal 
and  beautiful  that  one  cannot  get  hold  of 
matter  enough  to  express  it. 

It  seems  to  make  little  difference,  so 

far  as  the  hardship  is  concerned,  if  one  is 

to  be  a  poor  man,  whether  one  is  poor 

backwards  or  forwards.     The  millionaire 

141 


inspired  who  is  poor  because  he  has  not  time  to 
spend  his  money  and  the  artist  who  is 
poor  because  he  has  not  time  to  make  it, 
are  the  men  who  rule  the  world  between 
them,  and  they  are  both  paupers. 

Perhaps  it  is  the  main  trouble  with  our 
civilization  that  they  are  both  paupers, 
that  matter  and  the  spirit  just  at  present 
are  locked  away  by  themselves,  that  the 
two  most  powerful  kinds  of  men  a  civ- 
ilization can  have  —  its  rich  men  and  its 
artists,  the  men  who  can  buy  and  the  men 
who  can  make  —  are  lonely:  they  cannot 
seem  to  get  together. 

The  fact  that  they  belong  together,  that 
men  feel  that  they  do,  that  they  are  bound 
to  come  together  some  time,  is  shown  by 
the  history  of  every  family  fortune  that 
has  been  produced.  It  is  the  operation 
of  a  natural  elemental  law  that  wealth 
must  ally  itself  with  beauty  or  creative- 
ness  of  spirit,  with  men  who  dare,  or  melt 
away  and  be  redistributed  where  it  can. 

If  the  men  who  are  obliged  to  have 
142 


great  incomes  in  order  to  support  life  The  Millionaire 
wish  to  keep  their  great  incomes,  they  can  ^ 

only  do  it  by  allying  themselves  with  men  Lonely 
who  have  great  enthusiasms,  and  do  great 
things  whether  they  have  great  incomes 
or  not.  Men  who  are  clever  enough 
to  love  their  work  more  than  their 
wages  are  the  only  equals,  the  only  fit 
men  or  partners,  for  millionaires.  Inven- 
tors and  artists  are  the  only  men  who 
without  any  money  can  do  and  are  doing 
every  day  millionaire  sorts  of  things. 

It  has  seemed  to  me  that  the  day  is 
not  far  off  when  there  shall  be  a  turn  in 
the  tide  of  wealth  in  America.  The 
American  man  of  wealth  is  going  to  stop 
working  grimly  away  on  the  world  all 
alone  and  looking  askance  at  the  artist  — 
who  is  all  alone,  too.  He  is  going  to 
break  away  from  Philistinism,  from  a 
mere  bank  or  safe-deposit  view  of  life*,  and 
from  his  big. comfortable  clubs,  and  asso- 
ciate with  artists  and  with  men  of  genius, 
men  of  ideas,  inventions,  and  visions. 
143 


inspired       Inspired  millionaires,  the  most  envied  men 

Millionaires    •       ,1  11  i>          •       i         ,  •    ,  -,    • 

in  the  world,  and  inspired  artists  and  in- 
ventors, the  humble  inspired  laborers,  the 
most  despised  and  patronized  men  in  the 
world,  are  going  to  be  inevitably  thrown 
together.  They  have  the  making  of  the 
planet  between  them.  As  they  have  the 
necessary  gifts  of  matter  and  spirit  that 
go  to  the  making  of  a  planet  (one  that 
can  be  taken  seriously) ,  and  as  the  making 
of  a  great,  happy,  peaceful,  furnished 
planet  is  the  only  thing  big  enough  for 
such  men  to  be  interested  in,  they  can 
probably  do  it. 

It  has  been  attempted  in  the  last  two 
chapters  to  point  out  the  extreme  diffi- 
culty of  being  an  inspired  millionaire  of 
the  European  or  imported  kind,  in  this 
country  —  the  gentleman  of  leisure  and 
enjoyer  of  the  world,  who  seeks  to  benefit 
and  refine  it  by  the  way  he  spends  his 
money  and  by  the  ennobling  effect  of 
his  pleasures. 

It  is  intended  in  the  chapters  that  f  ol- 
144 


low  to  point  OUt  the  Opportunities  Of  the  The  Millionaire 

more  typical  American  millionaire,  we  are       °°e 

now   beginning   to    produce  —  the   man  Lonely 
who  is  inspired  in  making  his  money  in- 
stead of  in  spending  it. 


145 


Ill 

The  Millionaire  Who  Wants  to  be  Happy 

MILLIONAIRES,  as  seen  from 
Mount  Tom  on  an  Easter  morning, 
looking  across  the  country,  as  a  whole, 
seem  to  be  dotted  rather  thickly;  but 
they  do  not  look  as  important  —  from  up 
here  on  Mount  Tom,  with  a  big  fresh  sky 
over  them  —  as  they  do  down  in  North- 
ampton by  one's  fire-place,  with  The 
Springfield  Republican  in  one's  hands. 
And  even  there  —  even  in  a  Springfield 
Republican  sort  of  world  —  millionaires 
look  more  important  for  what  they  might 
be  than  for  what  they  are.  With  all  these 
miles  of  meadow  down  below,  all  so  still 
and  snowy,  and  beautiful  and  unconcerned 
looking,  I  have  been  wondering  why  I 
should  bring  my  new  unfinished  million- 
aires up  here.  I  have  caught  myself  re- 
membering a  line  of  Bliss  Carman's  some- 
146 


where,  about  being  a  "  fidget  and  a  re-  The  Millionaire 
former."  One  would  have  to  be  rather  be 
far  gone  to  be  a  reformer  up  on  Mount 
Tom  to-day  —  with  this  still  stretch  of 
snow  below  one  —  this  great  floor  of  sun- 
shine on  the  world.  I  call  people  to  wit- 
ness that  I  have  not  been  trying  to  make 
a  kind  of  fine  moral  flurry  and  improve 
people,  in  this  book,  and  get  millionaires 
to  do  right.  I  merely  want  our  million- 
aires to  be  happy.  And,  so  far  as  one 
can  see,  looking  over  the  country  at  large, 
they  do  not  seem  to  be  paying  the  slight- 
est attention  to  .it.  The  people  have  a 
right  to  have  their  millionaires  happy.  It 
is  the  millionaires  who  are  running  the 
world,  and  it  is  because  they  are  not  enjoy- 
ing their  work  that  they  are  not  running 
it  better.  It  would  be  a  matter  of  public 
concern  and  of  personal  pleasure  to  all  of 
us  to-day  to  see  one  happy  millionaire  — 
one  real  millionaire  who  is  really  enjoying 
himself,  who  is  daily  getting  the  taste  out 
of  the  world,  who  is  noticing  the  human 


inspired       race  and  playing  with  it,  the  way  artists 

Millionaires    j        /» 

do,  for  instance. 

I  sometimes  think  that  if  —  almost  any 
afternoon,  at  three  o'clock  —  one  could 
look  off  from  Mount  Tom  across  the  coun- 
try and  see  our  millionaires,  thousands  of 
them,  all  out  playing  golf  with  our  artists, 
the  real  ones  and  best  ones,  the  best 
sculptors,  painters,  composers,  singers, 
and  writers  —  happy  millionaires  would 
begin  to  be  seen  cropping  up  almost  every- 
where all  the  way  between  New  York 
and  Los  Angeles.  There  would  be  more 
happy  artists,  too.  They  would  catch 
each  others'  spirit.  All  that  millionaires 
need,  to  be  happy,  is  to  grow  more  like 
the  artists.  And  what  our  best  artists  in 
this  country  need,  is  to  grow  more  like 
millionaires. 

The  problem  seems  to  be,  how  to  get 
them  together  before  they  are  dead. 
When  the  millionaire  dies,  one  finds  that 
in  the  second  generation  his  money  is 
almost  always  spent  by,  and  with,  and  for, 
148 


artists,  and  after  the  artists  are  dead  they  The  Millionaire 

,  .1V          .  r™  Who  Wants  to 

are    almost    always    millionaires.     Iney  beHappy 
keep  on,  some  of  them,  like  Wagner  and 
Durer,   making   fortunes  —  one   fortune 
after  the  other,  out  of  their  graves. 

While  it  is  true  that  by  the  mere  move- 
ment and  stir  of  events  in  the  world, 
money  and  the  arts,  as  by  a  kind  of 
huge  cosmic  sex-attraction,  are  being 
inevitably  brought  together,  it  is  also  true 
that  they  do  not  come  together  any  sooner 
than  they  can  help.  When  wealth  and 
beauty  are  seen  together  to-day  in 
America  there  is  apt  to  be  something  a 
little  dogged  and  helpless  and  dragged- 
in  about  it.  It  has  the  air  of  a  last  resort, 
as  a  rule,  when  the  millionaires  and  the 
artists  are  seen  working  quietly  and  hope- 
fully together. 

The  main  difficulty  that  stands  between 
the  millionaires  and  the  artists  working 
together,  without  both  waiting  to  be  dead 
first,  instead  of  being  an  economic  diffi- 
culty, is  almost  purely  a  personal  one,  a 
i49 


inspired  difficulty  of  temperament.  Rich  men 
and  artists  —  each  taken  as  a  class,  the 
men  who  can  buy  and  the  men  who  can 
make  —  will  not  understand  each  other. 

To  the  rest  of  us  they  are  both  men  of 
proved  power  and  value,  men  who  control 
between  them  the  two  practical  secrets  of 
the  world  —  the  secret  of  being  poor  and 
powerful  and  the  secret  of  being  rich  and 
powerful.  But  they  do  not  respect  each 
other.  Because,  perchance,  the  million- 
aire is  a  man  who  sees  that  money  is  an 
inspired  thing  and  that  inspired  things 
can  be  done  with  money,  and  tries  to  get 
some,  the  artist  feels  superior;  and  be- 
cause the  artist  sees  that  inspired  things 
can  be  done  without  money,  and  is  doing 
them,  the  millionaire  looks  upon  him  as  a 
kind  of  happy,  mysterious,  intolerable 
person. 

It  is  one  of  the  concerns  of  this  part  of 
this  book  to  point  out  a  few  tokens  of  how 
the  millionaire  and  the  artist  in  this  coun- 
try are  coming  together. 
150 


They  are  going  to  come  together  be-  The  Millionaire 

,,  , .  .,  . .    ,      ,  p   Who  Wants  to 

cause  the  conceptions  that  artists  have  of  be  Happy 
millionaires  and  business  men  in  America 
are  going  to  change  in  the  next  fifty 
years.  People  have  stopped  putting  all 
business  men  together  into  one  indistin- 
guishable mass.  The  business  man  has 
appeared  in  America  who  is  insisting  that 
a  business  man  is  as  good  as  anybody. 
He  is  proving  that  he  has  the  same  spirit, 
the  same  principles,  and  the  same  motive 
in  his  work  that  the  artist  has. 

It  is  still  true  that  the  men  who  have 
the  habit  of  dropping  into  the  National 
Arts  Club  in  New  York  can  snuggle  up 
the  word  "  art  "  if  they  want  to,  and  with 
a  certain  serenity  and  self -congratulation, 
and  they  can  still  feel,  not  without  some 
plausibility,  that  they  are  a  little  nobler 
for  being  associated  with  the  arts  or  with 
the  professions,  and  a  little  more  high- 
minded  and  disinterested  than  business 
men.  But  their  time  is  limited. 


IV 

The  Millionaire  Who  Is  As  Good  As 
Anybody 

WE  HAVE  a  tradition  or  perhaps 
a  kind  of  left-over  consciousness, 
most  of  us  who  are  associated  with  the  pro- 
fessions, that  we  would  rather  not  be 
grocers  if  it  can  be  helped  —  even  great 
grocers.  The  professions  have  the  his- 
toric right  of  way  and  the  old-world  pres- 
tige on  their  side  and  they  seem  to  have  a 
higher  standing  in  the  community.  The 
more  distinguished  preachers  in  New 
York,  probably  —  the  majority  of  them — 
do  not  want  to  change  places  with  the 
more  distinguished  grocers  like  Park  and 
Tilford. 

One  of  the  most  hopeful  things  that 

can  be  pointed  out  in  the  business  world 

just  now  is  that  if  Park  and  Tilford  knew 

which  the  preachers  were,  out  of  the  more 

152 


distinguished    preachers    in    New    York  The  Millionaire 

,        /»  T  ,  .  ,     .  ,  i          Who  is  as  Good 

who  felt  superior  to  being  grocers  they  asAnybody 
would  not  go  to  hear  them  preach.  None 
of  the  best  grocers  would  go.  Some  of 
the  worst  ones  might  and  would  not  know 
the  difference.  But  the  best  grocers,  if 
they  go  to  church,  want  something  they 
can  use  to  lift  on  their  lives  the  next  day. 
This  is  the  next  cloud  the  size  of  a  man's 
hand.  Our  whole  American  country  is  full 
of  business  men  who  fail  to  get  inspiration 
out  of  preachers  who  think  that  being  a 
preacher  is  a  superior  or  more  high- 
minded  enterprise  than  being  a  grocer. 
Our  American  communities  all  have  men 
in  them  who  take  a  professional  pride  in 
business.  They  are  idealists.  They 
are  seeing  every  day  how  much  larger 
motives  and  how  much  more  generous 
understandings  and  how  much  nobler 
abilities  can  be  used,  every  hour  of  the  day 
and  the  night,  in  conducting  a  modern 
business.  They  have  discovered  that 
being  a  judge  or  a  bishop  or  a  physician 
153 


inspired  or  En  editor  or  En  Euthor  or  E  prof  essor  in 
this  AmericEn  country  meEns  just  whEt  E 
mEn  puts  into  it  End  no  more.  So  does 
being  E  grocer.  The  grocer  of  the  better 
sort  is  insisting  in  AmericE  to-dEy  tlmt  he 
is  ES  good  ES  Enybody.  He  is  deEling  E!! 
dEy  with  the  reEl  things  End  with  the  f  Ects, 
End  he  sees  tlmt  in  our  existing  morEl, 
economic,  End  SOCIE!  conditions  the  busi- 
ness life  IIES  become  the  storm-center,  the 
religion-center  of  the  world,  the  pkce 
where  the  TCE!  religion  of  the  people  is 
being  dEy  by  dEy  wrought  out  End  welded 
into  the  lives  of  men.  There  is  not  E 
business  one  CEn  think  of,  which  is  not 
full  of  little  temples  where  one  CEn  curse 
or  prEy.  Every  business  one  knows  IIES 
its  host  of  light  in  it,  fighting  EgEinst  its 
host  of  dErkness  —  one  set  of  men  con- 
ducting the  business  ES  if  they  End  the 
public  were  engEged  in  E  sort  of  mutuEl 
enthusiEsm  End  dEily  service,  End  peraiE- 
nent  success,  Enother  set  of  men  whose 
success  is  ruining  the  business  to  which 
154 


they  belong,  and  the  public  besides  —  and  The  Millionaire 
themselves.  The  American  business  man 
who  has  observed  these  things  is  the  most 
inspiring  character  this  country  has  pro- 
duced, because  he  is  every  day  seeing  big 
inspiring  things  to  do.  Our  best  business 
men  are  grasping  at  the  honors  and  the 
motives,  and  at  the  public  standing  of  the 
professions.  They  are  full  of  victorious 
self-respect,  and  are  proving  the  dignity 
and  raising  the  standing  of  the  business  in 
which  they  are  engaged. 

A  man  who  is  really  being  professional 
in  the  conduct  of  his  business,  who  is  doing 
all  the  while  hard  and  unprofessional- 
looking  things  in  a  professional  way,  can- 
not much  longer  be  ranked  by  society  in 
a  lower  row  than  the  man  who  is  merely 
being  a  judge.  A  great  many  people 
could  be  a  judge  professionally.  Being 
a  judge  is  easier.  Every  business  man 
knows  this,  and  he  sees  that  everybody  else 
is  going  to  know  it  soon,  that  society  is 
going  to  see  how  difficult  and  how  honor- 

'55 


inspired       able  the  thing  he  is  doing  is.     The  man 

Millionaires       •       «  A       •         i  •     ••       • 

who  is  professional  in  business  is  going  to 
get  more  prestige  and  standing  out  of  it 
than  the  man  who  is  merely  professional 
in  a  profession.  The  honors  of  the  world 
go  to  the  men  who  foresee  the  next  neces- 
sary, unexpected,  and  difficult  thing  to  do, 
and  then  do  it.  Under  our  present  condi- 
tions it  takes  more  brains  to  be  a  good, 
morally-beautiful  grocer  than  it  does  to 
be  a  good,  morally-beautiful  clergyman; 
and  it  is  already  beginning  to  look,  in  some 
quarters,  as  if  the  clergymen  would  have 
to  hurry  a  little  in  the  next  generation  if 
they  are  going  to  keep  up  to  grocers  and 
icemen,  and  coal  dealers  in  the  pews  who 
are  practicing  what  clergymen  preach, 
and  who  illustrate  their  sermons  for  them 
during  the  week.  It  is  generally  the  illus- 
trations that  people  prefer  in  sermons. 
The  man  who  devotes  himself  to  being 
a  grocer  professionally,  for  instance,  who 
makes  his  business  profitable  enough  to 
be  permanent  and  at  the  same  time  creates 
156 


values  and  lowers  prices  in  his  city  so  that  The  Millionaire 
the  whole  world  wishes  it  could  come  there  as  °0< 

and  live,  is  going  to  be  not  only  the  lead- 
ing citizen  in  his  own  town,  but  a  national 
figure.  The  first  man  who  uses  his  power 
to  dominate  the  markets  of  a  great  city 
and  to  make  it  the  cheapest  city  to  live  in  in 
the  United  States  will  be  news  around  the 
world.  His  business  character  will  be  the 
leading  advertisement  put  out  by  the 
Board  of  Trade.  Factories  will  flock  to 
the  city,  and  great  schools  and  great  rail- 
roads and  great  churches.  Any  grocer 
in  any  city  who  will  get  control  of  its  mar- 
kets and  who  will  raise  values  and  reduce 
prices  so  that  people  can  live  there  a 
fourth  cheaper  than  they  can  in  the  cities 
that  compete  with  it,  will  be  so  big  a  man 
that  railroads  will  be  rebuilt  for  him  and 
geography  reconstructed  for  him.  He 
will  put  out  his  hand  and  stir  the  center 
of  population  of  the  United  States. 

When  a  few  cities  have  moved  over  to 
where  he  is,  and  a  few  of  the  other  cities 
157 


inspired  farther  off,  already  feel  that  they  are 
Millionaires  starting>  and  will  have  to  go,  the  other  cities 
will  grow  business-like  enough  to  have  a 
morally  beautiful  grocer  or  professional 
business  man  of  their  own,  in  self  defense. 
Then,  when  all  the  cities  have  learned  the 
lesson  and  America  has  achieved  at  last 
the  most  high-minded,  most  scientific, 
most  efficient  grocery  business  that  can 
be  found  —  that  is,  the  business  in  which 
values  have  been  brought  up  the  high- 
est and  prices  have  been  brought  down 
the  lowest  —  all  the  nations,  and  all  the 
men,  and  all  the  money  of  the  nations  will 
begin  pouring  into  America  as  if  it  were 
some  vast  trough  at  the  bottom  of  the 
world. 

This  may  sound  religious  or  poetic ;  but 
it  is  business. 

Thousands  of  men  who  have  partly  be- 
lieved it  and  who  have  partly  tried  it,  have 
been  believing  and  trying  it  harder  every 
year,  and  they  have  found  that  the  more 
they  succeed  the  more  professional  they 
158 


become,  and  that  the  more  professional  The  Millionaire 
they  become  the  more  capable  and  bril- 
liant  men  they  are  able  to  draw  into  busi- 
ness with  them.  The  immense  propor- 
tion of  university  men  who  are  going  into 
business  every  year  instead  of  into  the 
professions  —  men  of  the  highest  possible 
intellectual  calibre  and  spirit  —  are  being 
attracted  because  the  different  forms  of 
business  in  this  country  are  becoming 
more  professional  in  the  powers  they  call 
for  and  the  spirit  they  exercise  than  the 
older  professions.  The  great  business 
houses,  or  nearly  all  of  them,  are  profes- 
sional in  their  origin,  to-day.  They  begin 
in  laboratories  and  in  the  researches  of 
experts  and  specialists  and  are  based  upon 
secrets  of  chemistry  and  geology  and 
botany,  and  the  key  to  modern  business 
success  is  getting  more  and  more  into  the 
hands  of  inventors,  and  scientists,  and  of 
the  masters  of  materials. 

When  one  stops  to  think  of  the  actual 
opportunity  for  the  spirit  of  the  arts  and 
159 


inspired       sciences,  in  the  development  of 'the  soil, 

Millionaires    ,,  .  .,  .  .,  . , 

the  mines,  the  very  air  up  over  the  earth  — 
when  one  stops  to  think  of  the  supremacy 
of  the  inventor  to-day,  of  the  glory 
and  power  of  the  successful  organizer  — 
the  elevation  of  business  ideals  and  the 
crowding  of  our  picked  men  into  trade 
and  commerce  seems  almost  a  matter  of 
course.  The  big,  permanent  things  can- 
not be  done  by  men  with  small  spirits  or 
with  small  morals ;  and  when  one  considers 
how  big  the  things  are  that  are  waiting  to 
be  done  in  this  way,  by  the  bigger  type  of 
business  man,  it  makes  being  a  lawyer 
now-a-days,  or  a  clergyman,  or  an  author, 
seem  a  comparatively  plain  and  humble 
affair. 

This  is  what  the  professional  business 
man  is  seeing  all  about  him  in  America. 
It  is  what  makes  the  American  business 
man  lead  the  world, —  this  kind  of  in- 
spired sense  he  has  of  himself,  and  of  his 
own  career,  and  of  what  can  be  done  with 
material  and  homely  things.  We  are  all 
1 60 


beginning  to  guess  that  there  is  nothing  The  Millionaire 
intrinsically    second-rate    about    getting  asan'body^ 
rich.     The  only  reason  that  getting  rich 
has  not  ranked  a  man  highly  is  that  the 
wrong  men  have  taken  hold  of  it. 

The  millionaire  in  America  who  obvi- 
ously belongs  to  the  creative  or  artistic 
class,  who  conducts  his  business  with  a  cer- 
tain richness  of  temperament,  who  con- 
ceals his  money  decently  and  safely  in  his 
personal  character,  so  that  artists  and  pro- 
fessional men  feel  that  he  is  one  of  them- 
selves, will  be  taken  seriously  into  the  fold 
soon,  by  our  professional  men.  Our  best, 
our  most  select,  and  gentlemanlike,  and 
remote  ones  will  be  convinced  (even 
our  minor  poets  will  see  it)  that  a  business 
man  can  be  an  artist.  He  will  convince 
them  by  the  way  he  conducts  his  business, 
by  being  what  may  be  called  in  a  certain 
robust  sense,  a  poet  with  a  million  dollars 
— a  somewhat  realer  poet  than  we  are  used 
to  — a  man  to  whom  a  million  dollars  is  an 
art  form. 


inspired          When  a  few  millionaires  like  this  have 

Millionaires   i  •      i«    •         i  i  11 

been  judiciously  scattered  around  the 
country  the  breach  between  wealth  and 
the  arts,  between  making  a  fortune  and 
making  a  book  or  a  picture,  will  cease,  and 
the  National  Arts  Club  will  gradually  set- 
tle down  at  last  into  being  human  and 
sociable  and  friendly-like  with  the  Board 
of  Trade. 


162 


A  Million  Dollars  As  A  Profession 

fT^HERE  are  three  principles  that  a 
JL  business  man  who  is  as  good  as  any- 
body, who  is  an  artist,  or  who  ranks  him- 
self with  the  professions,  applies  to  his 
business : 

I.     Not  making  all  the  money  he  can. 
II.     Making  money  enough. 
III.     Mixed  motives. 

He  sees  to  it  that  he  is  serving  others 
and  serving  himself  at  the  same  time.  He 
fails  to  see  anything  irreligious,  or  second- 
rate,  or  immoral  about  mixed  motives,  if 
they  are  mixed  properly.  He  believes 
that  mixed  motives  are  the  best  ones  to 
have,  that  they  are  the  most  sound,  manly, 
and  candid  ones,  and  the  most  religious, 
and  that  it  takes  the  most  religion  to  mix 
them,  and  that  they  are  the  only  kind  that 
work.  Service  without  self-preservation 
163 


inspired       does  not  look  holy  to  him  and  self-preser- 

Millionaires          ..  . .,  .          , 

vation  without  service  does  not  look  inter- 
esting. As  long  as  it  is  really  true  that 
the  art  of  making  money  is  the  mere  plain 
rudimentary  instinct  of  making  as  much 
as  one  can,  it  cannot  be  called  an  art.  It 
does  not  interest,  and  never  has,  and  can 
never  hope  to  interest  an  artist.  It  does 
not  amount  to  enough.  There  is  nothing 
that  is  really  original,  or  that  is  really 
capable,  about  making  as  much  money  as 
one  can.  Anyone  could  have  thought 
of  it.  Nearly  everybody  has  —  who  has 
conducted  a  business  at  all  —  since  the  be- 
ginning of  the  world.  But  the  moment 
a  man  undertakes  to  conduct  his  business 
in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  a  service  to  the 
public,  and  to  his  employees,  and  a  perma- 
nent profit  to  himself,  he  becomes  an  art- 
ist. It  is  the  power  in  a  man  which  insists 
upon  putting  essential  things  together, 
and  upon  keeping  "them  together,  which 
makes  an  artist.  Almost  anyone  ought  to 
be  able  to  get  rich,  by  the  simple  rudi- 


mentary  device  of  leaving  one  or  two  of  A  Million 

,1  ;         -•-/»  •          MI*  •  Dollars  as  a 

them  out.  If  one  is  willing  to  give  up  Profession 
enough  for  it,  if  one  is  willing  to  be  a 
great  neuter  personality  like  Mr.  Rocke- 
feller, make  a  mere  business-is-business 
device  of  one's  self,  a  kind  of  hydraulic 
valve  or  pump  of  riches,  it  would  be  com- 
paratively easy  to  be  rich,  and  would  not 
take  an  artist.  And  an  artist  would  not 
try.  It  would  not  interest  him  —  a  mere 
monotonous  taking  of  all  he  could  get, 
whether  there  was  any  object  in  it  or  not. 
He  would  not  be  willing  to  give  up  the 
self-indulgences  of  the  real  man  of  busi- 
ness— the  other  strands  of  business  that  a 
man  enjoys — the  candor  and  the  glory, 
and  the  self-respect  that  always  go  with  a 
great,  joyous,  or  real  success,  and  that 
make  getting  rich  a  little  slower  and  more 
complicated.  The  element  of  personal 
profit,  a  real  artist  in  business  looks  upon 
with  dignity  and  frankness,  and  as  a  mat- 
ter of  course,  and  he  is  no  more  willing  to 
give  it  up  than  the  element  of  workmanship 
165 


inspired  and  public  service.  If  he  is  serving  others 
he  insists  on  making  money,  if  only  as  a 
bond  of  permanence  in  what  he  is  doing. 
It  is  all  that  keeps  him  from  being  degraded 
to  the  rank  of  a  mere  charity  worker.  Any- 
body can  conduct  a  charity  and  be  kind 
and  superficial,  correcting  with  money  the 
abuses  it  has  wrought;  but  it  takes  an 
artist  of  the  highest  human  and  business 
resources  to  establish  a  great  industrial 
house  on  such  profound  principles  of 
mutual  service,  and  voluntary  generosity, 
and  self-support,  that  it  will  renew  itself 
from  within,  and  last  for  generations,  and 
be  what  a  great  business  house  ought  to 
be  —  something  to  be  pointed  to  as  one  of 
the  moral  dignities  of  the  nation,  a  monu- 
ment to  the  probity  and  beauty  of  the 
people.  To  be  charitable,  to  help  others 
in  business  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  them 
not  worth  helping  any  more,  is  a  small 
thing  for  a  millionaire  to  do.  A  man  with 
a  few  cents  could  do  it.  The  special  op- 
portunity of  a  millionaire  is  that,  if  he  has 

1 66 


brains  and  capital  enough  and  they  are  A  Million 
mixed  together  enough,  he  is  in  a  position 
to  do  business  on  a  permanent  basis,  to 
adopt  principles,  and  methods,  and  faiths 
which  make  him  ready  to  forego  the  large, 
foolish,  swift  profits  so  much  looked  for 
now  —  and  conduct  a  business  with  quiet- 
ness and  dignity  and  without  getting  out 
of  breath.  (It  is  the  difference  between 
breathing  with  the  upper  chest  and  a  deep 
abdominal  breathing  in  business  that  men 
are  slowly  beginning  to  realize.) 

Almost  any  man  who  goes  below  his 
diaphragm  in  anything  he  does  is  ready 
to  bear  witness  that  the  idea  that  has  lately 
taken  possession  of  many  of  us  that "  busi- 
ness is  business,"  and  that  humanity  is  a 
special  department  by  itself,  is  contra- 
dicted by  the  plain  matter-of-fact  daily 
experience  of  the  men  who  always  rule  at 
last.  The  experience  of  these  men  in 
every  age  of  the  world  has  been  that  neither 
business  nor  humanity  can  be  of  any  per- 
manent account  unless  it  is  put  with  the 
167 


inspired  other.  Not  until  the  business  ability  that 
has  made  our  ordinary  American  million- 
aire, and  the  human  or  artistic  ability  that 
has  made  the  artist,  are  being  put  together 
daily  in  the  same  life  —  the  life  of  our 
typical  modern  man  of  affairs  —  can  we 
expect  anything  but  puddling  and  tempo- 
rizing, either  with  the  social,  industrial  sit- 
uation, or  the  artistic,  philanthropic  one. 
The  business  man  who  is  heaping  up  social 
conditions  which  require  him  to  turn  phi- 
lanthropist, and  the  philanthropist  who  is 
heaping  up  financial  conditions  which  re- 
quire him  to  turn  business  man,  are  both 
ridiculous.  The  very  essence  of  sound- 
ness and  permanence  in  a  man's  business 
is  that  the  man  is  doing  good  in  it  as  he 
goes  along,  and  the  essence  of  a  sound 
philanthropy  is  that  with  time  and  capital 
it  pays. 

In  saying  that  the  business  man  who 
ranks  his  business  with  the  arts  and  the 
professions  does  it  by  employing  three 
principles  (not  making  too  much  money; 

161 


making  enough;  mixed  motives),  it  A  Million 
ought  not  to  be  overlooked  that  the  value 
of  these  principles  depends  entirely  upon 
the  way  in  which  they  are  carried  out. 
Perhaps  the  best  way  to  carry  out  these 
principles  is  to  put  with  them  three  en- 
thusiasms : 

First,  an  enthusiasm  for  doing  the 
thing  one  does  perfectly  (which  requires 
not  making  too  much  money) . 

Second,  an  enthusiasm  for  doing  the 
thing  one  does  independently  and  in  one's 
own  way  (which  requires  making  money 
enough) . 

Third,  a  general  enthusiasm  for  the 
world  and  for  the  other  people  who  are 
allowed  in  it. 


169 


VI 

A  Million  Dollars  as  an  Art  Form 

1 

Surplus  and  Aristocracy 

THE  fundamental  thing  in  a  man 
with  a  million  dollars,  if  he  wants  to 
be  an  artist,  is  imagination.  A  man  has 
a  vision  of  something  to  do,  which  if  done 
in  the  way  he  sees  it,  will  be  good.  Then 
he  does  it. 

There  is  always  something  fine  and 
willful  and  aristocratic  and  full  of  leisure 
and  pleasure  and  surplus  about  a  man,  be 
he  rich  or  poor,  who  creates  a  new  value 
in  the  world.  The  creative  imagination  is 
some  man's  joy,  his  surplus  of  selfishness. 

The  common  people  of  Boston  did  not 
want  music  taught  to  them  in  the  public 
schools,  but  Lowell  Mason  did  not  want 
to  live  in  a  wilderness  or  at  best  on  a  little 
oasis  of  music  with  a  few  other  lonely 
170 


shivering  musicians  in  New  England,  Surplus  and 
and  he  was  possessed  with  the  idea  that 
every  one  should  sing.  There  was  almost 
no  one  who  thought  he  was  right  and  there 
was  no  one  who  would  give  him  a  chance 
to  prove  it,  and  the  best  he  could  do  at 
first  was  to  get  the  people  of  Boston  to 
give  him  permission  to  pay  his  own  salary 
while  he  proved  to  them  that  they  wanted 
music.  When  the  people  had  had  it 
proved  to  them  in  Boston  that  they  wanted 
music,  it  was  found  that  they  wanted  it  in 
every  city  in  the  United  States.  It  would 
be  hard  to  measure  the  value  to  this  coun- 
try of  the  willfulness  of  Mr.  Lowell 
Mason.  There  is  a  great  chorus  of  shop 
girls  and  factory  hands  singing  The  Crea- 
tion to-day  in  more  than  one  city  in 
America,  and  the  joy,  or  the  memory  or 
hope  of  joy,  the  bare  idea  that  there  is 
a  great,  free,  overflowing  world  of  it,  is 
being  kept  within  the  hearing  of  the 
people. 

And  what  Lowell  Mason  did  with  the 
171 


inspired       common  people  in  Boston,  Major  Hig- 
ginson  with  his  Symphony  has  been  doing 


A  Million     ^th  the  so-called  cultivated  classes.  They 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  are  not  quite  cultivated  enough  to  want 
to  pay  for  all  of  it  themselves,  as  yet,  but 
they  are  going  to  be,  and  orchestras  are 
being  wanted  and  springing  up  all  over 
the  country  because  a  willful  man  in  Bos- 
ton wanted  people  to  have  an  orchestra 
that  they  did  not  want  —  a  man  who  did 
not  care  to  go  to  Europe  of  an  evening 
after  dinner  when  he  wanted  music. 
Nearly  all  the  best  things  for  people  have 
had  to  be  forced  upon  them  by  some  man's 
overflowing  selfishness,  and  what  a  democ- 
racy is  for,  is  to  create  a  free  and  favor- 
able atmosphere  for  producing  excep- 
tional personalities,  men  who  will  do  these 
things,  rich  and  poor,  men  who  are  willful 
with  visions  of  their  own  for  others,  and 
who  give  people  a  chance  to  want  what 
they  are  glad  they  wanted  after- 
wards. One  could  go  on  forever  multi- 
plying instances  of  the  fact  that  the  great 
17* 


or  new  ideas  begin  in  the  aristo-  Surplus  and 
cratic  spirit,  in  the  peremptory  serv-  Ans 
ice  of  some  man  who  has  a  vision 
of  his  own,  some  one  like  Pullman 
with  his  sleeper,  who  centers  himself  upon 
his  vision  until  it  is  everyone's.  From  the 
Krupp  gun  up  to  Millet  and  Whistler  and 
Wagner's  operas  the  principle  holds  good. 
We  look  for  something  assertive  about  all 
real  values  from  the  little  things  to  the 
great,  from  the  unpractical  phonograph, 
the  visionary  railroad,  from  the  self-asser- 
tion of  coal,  of  steel,  of  Copernicus,  Co- 
lumbus, Luther,  up  to  the  self-assertion  of 
the  New  Testament,  that  divine,  willful  be- 
lieving in  everybody,  that  standing  up  for 
people  in  spite  of  themselves  which  started 
our  modern  world.  There  seems  to  be 
nothing  good  that  is  not  aristocratic  and 
noble  and  free  and  voluntary.  What 
civilization  is  for  is  to  produce  in  every 
temperament  and  walk  of  life  men  with  a 
surplus.  The  man  who  has  a  vision  of  his 
own  that  is  so  good  that  he  is  in  danger  of 
overdoing  it,  and  even  of  doing  wrong 
173 


inspired       with  it,  is  the  man  the  world  can  least 

Millionaires       ™       i    ,       .1 

afford  to  throw  away.       We  can  better 
A  Million     afford  to  let  him  do  wrong1  with  it  awhile 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  and  practice  on  us  and  do  right  slowly  and 
clumsily;  and  the  only  safe  course  for 
society  would  seem  to  be  not  to  annihilate 
him  or  emasculate  him,  or  smother  him 
out,  or  flatten  him  into  a  socialist,  or  make 
impossible  in  him  what  one  might  call  his 
selfishness,  but  to  take  his  selfishness  — 
that  great,  natural,  driving  force  of  things 
—  and  turn  it  on  the  main  drive-wheel  of 
the  world  and  on  the  good  of  all  of  us. 


The  Millionaire  and  His  Imagination 

I  have  been  wondering  of  late  why  it  is 
that  the  schemes  that  are  put  forward 
in  behalf  of  the  very  poor  and  for 
the  betterment  of  the  condition  of  the 
rich  seem  to  come  to  so  little.  Neither 
the  very  poor  nor  the  very  rich  seem  to  like 
their  schemes,  and  yet  the  schemes  look 
true,  most  of  them,  and  worthy.  Every- 
174 


one  has  a  vague  feeling  that  they  ought  The 

,  ,      .       ,  i  .1  •    i       i  Millionaire 

to  be  admired,  and  everyone  thinks  how  andHis 
good  and  how  charitable  they  are.  But  imagination 
they  are  not  attractive  or  catching.  No- 
body cares  about  them  except  the  people 
who  think  of  them,  and  committees.  I 
have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  most  of 
our  schemes  for  getting  millionaires  to  do 
as  they  should,  are  failing  to-day,  not 
because  the  schemes  are  right  or  wrong, 
but  because  they  are  neuter.  They  fail 
to  reckon  with  the  creative  joy  of  a  man 
in  what  he  has  thought  of  himself.  What 
the  very  poor  and  the  very  rich  seem  to 
be  needing  most  in  this  country  just  now 
is  not  to  have  money  given  to  them,  or 
money  taken  away  from  them,  but  the 
chance  to  help  themselves.  If  they  could 
break  away  from  Edwin  D.  Mead  and 
the  rest  of  us,  and  all  the  other  dear,  faith- 
ful people  who  worry  about  them,  and 
plan  for  them,  and  would  think  of  some- 
thing they  would  be  glad  to  do  themselves, 
things  would  begin  to  budge.  If  society 
175 


inspired       ever  wishes  to  start  up  the  millionaire  in 

Millionaires    .-.          .    •,  .     ,.         ..  ..         .__ 

the  right  direction,  it  will  need  to  reach 
A  Million     through  to  the  joy,  the  vitality,  and  energy 

Dollars  as  an . 

Art  Form  in  the  man,  to  strike  down  through  to  his 
sense  of  power,  and  to  stop  pottering  with 
his  sense  of  propriety. 

One  must  not  speak  of  anyone's  con- 
science disrespectfully,  but  it  does  seem  to 
be  true  that  when  the  place  we  get  hold  of 
in  a  man  is  his  conscience,  it  does  not  seem 
to  be  a  very  practical  hold.  His  con- 
science, is  there  of  course,  always,  but  what 
of  it?  It  is  at  best  only  a  very  small  part 
of  a  man,  and  if  our  hold  on  a  man  is  to  be 
firm  and  enduring,  and  endure  moods  and 
all  kinds  of  events  and  the  weather  of  the 
world,  it  seems  to  be  necessary  to  get  hold 
of  the  whole  man,  and  the  only  way  to  get 
hold  of  the  whole  man  is  to  get  hold  of  the 
power  in  him  which  most  sums  him  up, 
which  concentrates  the  whole  of  him  in 
itself,  and  this  means  that  we  must 
strike  down  through  to  the  creative  in- 
stinct in  the  man,  the  stronghold  of  vital- 
176 


ity  and  desire.  It  is  not  going  to  be  by  The 
appealing  to  his  sense  of  what  he  ought  to 
want  or  by  pulling  peevishly  on  the  s]eeve  imagination 
of  his  conscience  or  by  changing  his 
clothes,  but  by  appealing  to  what  he  does 
want,  by  rousing  the  nobler  passion  in  the 
man,  the  lion  of  delight  in  him,  the  visions 
and  the  dreams,  the  sense  of  noble  oppor- 
tunity, of  personal  destiny,  of  identity 
with  great  movements  and  deeds,  that  men 
like  millionaires  are  going  to  be  made  to 
do  things.  In  other  words,  if  a  million- 
aire is  to  accomplish  great  things  with  his 
money,  he  must  be  allowed,  like  any  other 
man,  to  act  with  it  like  a  genius  or  an 
artist. 

The  main  thing  in  the  artist  that  makes 
him  an  artist  is  his  creative  function,  and 
the  main  thing  that  seems  to  make  a  mil- 
lionaire a  great  millionaire,  a  genius  or 
an  artist  with  money,  is  his  passion  for 
thinking  of  things  himself,  and  putting 
them  together,  his  imagination  or  virility 
of  thought.  The  artist  is  never  so  hard 
177 


inspired       put  to  it  in  this  world  that  he  has  to  look 
around  in  it  to  do  good.     He  creates  and 


A  Million     iikes    it.       After    he   has    created    (like 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  God)  ,  he  says  it  is  good,  afterwards.  The 
good  is  thrown  in  and  is  too  obvious  to  be 
mentioned,  with  a  great  artist,  and  the 
probability  seems  to  be  that  the  great  mil- 
lionaire, when  he  comes,  like  Leonardo  da 
Vinci  or  Phidias,  will  do  good  in  the  same 
way,  not  by  poking  dismally  around  the 
world  and  being  on  committees,  and  try- 
ing to  be  self  -sacrificing  and  trying 
vaguely  to  make  people  happy,  but  by 
being  happy  with  some  deep  happiness 
himself,  and  overflowing  the  world  with  it. 
The  real  artist  does  not  see  anything  to 
be  ashamed  of  in  this.  He  believes  that 
the  creative  instinct,  the  instinct  of  pro- 
ducing and  reproducing  values,  was  in- 
tended in  this  world  as  a  personal  joy  and 
that  it  would  not  be  a  capable,  sound,  or 
well-knit  world  if  it  were  not.  He  be- 
lieves that  the  best  use  to  make  of  a  crea- 
tive joy  is  to  have  it,  and  that  the  best 
178 


way  to  be  of  service  to  others  is  to  have  The 
enough.  He  believes  that  a  painter  who 
paints  a  picture  merely  to  make  other  peo-  imagination 
pie  happy  hurts  their  feelings,  and  he  be- 
lieves that  when  a  million  dollars  really 
appears  which  can  be  called  an  art- form, 
it  will  not  be  an  altruistic-looking  million 
dollars.  It  will  merely  be  a  million  dol- 
lars having  a  good  time,  i.  e.,  it  will  be  a 
million  dollars  full  of  creative  imagina- 
tion. 

When  we  see  a  man  in  this  world  having 
virtues  for  the  fun  of  it,  we  call  it  the 
artistic  temperament. 

The  thing  that  makes  an  artist  an  artist 
is  that  he  is  in  the  daily  act  of  using  and 
enjoying  his  best  and  fullest  self,  and 
that  except  as  a  last  resort  he  will  have 
nothing  to  do  with  the  pure  or  rank  forms 
of  unselfishness.  He  believes  that  true  or 
great  love  consists  not  in  unselfishness, 
but  in  identifying  one's  selfishness  with 
other  people's.  And  he  is  frank  about 
it  and  acts  as  if  it  were  so,  no  matter  how 
i79 


inspired       it  looks.     Why  should  not  a  millionaire 

8  be  allowed  to  be  an  artist? 
A  Million         There  is  no  reason  why  a  true  artist  or 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  true  millionaire  should  be  expected  to  feel 
a  little  inferior  for  selecting  his  own  inter- 
ests and  the  interests  he  was  born  next  to 
and  caring  for  them.  He  believes  that  as 
a  plain  matter  of  fact  a  man  who  pursues 
his  own  interests  and  other  people's  to- 
gether and  who  considers  that  they  belong 
together,  is  doing  a  more  noble  and  diffi- 
cult as  well  as  a  more  religious  thing  than 
the  flat  altruist  or  the  merely  unselfish 
man  has  ever  dreamed  of.  A  good, 
hearty,  selfish  man  who  is  having  a  good, 
hearty,  daily  sense  of  identity  and  oneness 
with  the  world  and  is  mixing  himself  and 
his  money  with  it,  seems  more  spiritual  to 
an  artist,  in  spite  of  appearances,  than  an 
altruist.  Altruism,  from  his  point  of 
view,  is  a  kind  of  tired,  tepid,  proper 
goodness.  Altruists  may  have  a  better 
look  at  first,  but  what  altruism  is 
really  made  of  is  a  sense  of  otherness, 

i  to 


a  sense  that  other  people  are  other  people,  The 

and  that  they  are  different  from  us,  and 

that  we  must  do  them  good.     The  one  imagination 

thing  in  a  million  dollars  that  can  make  it 

an  art  form  is  a  man  in  it  who  is  filling 

it  with  his  own  selfish  personal  desire  to  be 

happy.     As  it  would  be  underwitted  to 

try  to  be  happy  alone,  he  tries  to  have  all 

his  happiness,  his  growth,  and  his  fortune 

so  conducted  that  they  will  be  full  of  the 

growth    and    happiness    of    others.     A 

really  great  fortune,  made  by  an  artist,  is 

a  fortune  that  expresses  a  man's  oneness 

with  the  world,  his  daily  creative  joy  in 

something  he  and  the  world  have  had  a 

great   time   doing  together.     There   are 

many  pleasant  things  that  can  be  said  of 

altruism,  but  altruism  is  never  finished 

until  this  last  fine  touch  of  selfishness  has 

been  placed  upon  it. 

Probably  if  the  facts  were  known,  we 
do  not  any  of  us  believe  in  pure  unselfish- 
ness.    What  we  really  believe  in  is  selfish- 
ness properly  mixed,  but  we  keep  it  as  a 
ifi 


inspired       little  secret  of  our  own  and  we  are  not 

breathing  it  to  other  people  because  we 

A  Million     are  afraid  they  would  make  too  much  use 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  of  it.  The  artist,  whether  he  is  a  million- 
aire or  not,  is  more  frank  than  the  rest  of 
us,  and  takes  his  stand  boldly.  Being 
purely  selfish  or  unselfish  is  lazy,  he 
thinks.  When  people  complain  that  they 
must  draw  the  line  somewhere,  he  answers 
that  the  drawing  of  the  line  is  what  a 
man's  art  or  what  his  religion  is  for.  It  is 
what  makes  them  interesting ;  and  secretly 
all  the  live  folks  in  the  world,  whether 
they  are  in  the  sports  or  in  the  prayer- 
meetings,  agree  with  him.  Drawing  the 
line  and  seeing  it  drawn  straight  is  what 
the  world  likes.  It  has  a  good, 
healthy  liking  for  selfishness.  It  does 
not  want  millionaires  who  are  mere  altru- 
ists. The  world  is  like  a  woman,  and 
what  sensible  woman  wants  a  man  about 
who  is  loving  her  for  her  own  sake?  She 
would  rather  be  one  of  a  man's  failings, 
a  happiness,  a  self-indulgence  that  he  can- 
182 


not  help.  It  is  the  one  thing  in  a  husband  The 
that  makes  her  happy,  and  what  society 
really  demands  of  a  man  with  a  million  imagination 
dollars  is  that  he  should  keep  from  being 
distant  and  benevolent  and  charitable 
with  it  and  from  improving  people  in- 
stead of  enjoying  them.  The  last  thing 
the  world  can  afford  to  do  is  to  do  any- 
thing that  will  keep  its  millionaires  from 
being  selfish  like  its  artists.  We  want  the 
artist  to  be  selfish  enough  to  be  a  good  one, 
and  we  want  the  millionaire  to  be  selfish 
enough  to  make  the  best  possible  use  of 
being  a  millionaire.  This  may  be  a  dan- 
gerous-looking truth,  but  the  best  way  to 
know  a  truth  is  by  the  fine  manly  intelli- 
gent dangers  that  go  with  it,  and  by  the 
way  it  takes  for  granted  that  the  people 
are  not  fools. 

Money  is  already  learning  the  artist's 
instinct  and  is  learning  to  live,  gradually, 
and  to  enjoy  living.  The  time  is  already 
at  hand  when  the  most  characteristic  trait 
of  money  will  be  this  living,  overflowing, 
183 


inspired       neighborly  creativeness.     It  will  be  found 

Millionaires  ••  .  ,      ,    .  •        «  • 

engaged  in   seeing   and   doing  the   big 
A  Million     things  that  humanity  has  put  in  an  order 

Dollars  as  an  . 

Art  Form  for  —  and  it  will  see  them  so  truly  and  so 
nobly  that  it  will  do  them  and  look  out  for 
itself  besides.  The  man  who  is  redeem- 
ing the  business  in  which  he  is  engaged, 
up  to  the  boundary  line  of  loss,  holding 
it  to  the  voluntary  small,  slow  profit  that 
belongs  to  a  great,  dignified  business  — 
the  man  who  is  making  men  and  money 
and  things  together,  will  be  a  not  uncom- 
mon sight.  He  will  keep  from  falling 
into  the  three  great  fallacies  of  modern 
ambition  —  quick  money,  large  money,  or 
no  money,  and  he  will  look  upon  wealth  as 
the  great  artist  looks  upon  art,  as  the 
supreme  sociable  institution.  His  mil- 
lion dollars  will  not  be  his  altruism,  his 
sense  of  being  different  and  of  doing  peo- 
ple good,  and  it  will  not  be  his  lazy  un- 
selfishness and  it  will  not  be  his  sympathy 
or  suffering-with,  but  it  will  be  creative, 
and  mutual,  a  great  hearty  joy- with 
across  a  world. 

184 


He  is  not  unaware  (for  thousands  of  The 
years  the  artist  has  not  been  allowed  to  be) 
that  the  course  he  has  taken  has  the  look  imagination 
of  selfishness.  It  will  probably  always 
be  a  question  to  some  people.  In  the 
meantime  he  can  only  wait  for  cant  to  go 
by,  and  hope  in  his  own  quiet  way  to  make 
his  selfishness  as  effective  as  possible. 
The  question  that  always  interests  the 
artist  and  the  millionaire  the  most,  is 
whether  or  not  he  is  going  to  be  a  great 
artist  or  a  great  millionaire.  All  one  has 
to  do  with  one's  selfishness,  if  one  wants 
to  be  a  great  artist  or  a  great  millionaire, 
is  to  apply  one's  imagination  to  it.  The 
moment  a  man  applies  his  imagination  to 
a  selfish  interest  and  begins  to  see  it  in 
its  possible  relations,  a  selfish  interest  be- 
gins to  cross-fertilize  and  to  be  all 
wrought  in  with  other  people's. 

Not  long  ago  a  man  who  owned  a  fac- 
tory and  had  made  his  money  to  an  un- 
usual degree  in  this  spirit  divided  his  en- 
tire   fortune    at    his    death    among    his 
185 


inspired       employees.     He  did  not  spoil  it  by  being 

merely  conscientious  and  altruistic  about 

A  Maiion     it.     He  had  enjoyed  thinking  about  it  all 

Dollars  as  an  i       •  i 

Art  Form  "is  last  days  —  the  idea  that  he  was  going 
to  share  the  rest  of  his  money  with  the 
men  who  had  helped  him  make  it.  The 
more  he  made  this  use  of  his  money  a  per- 
sonal self-indulgence,  the  more  economi- 
cal and  business-like  it  was,  and  the  more 
the  men  liked  it  and  the  more  everybody 
got  out  of  it.  The  best  and  most  profit- 
able way  the  world  can  do  with  its  million- 
aires would  seem  to  be  not  to  try  to  stop 
their  selfishness  and  scold  them  for  it,  but 
to  call  out  their  better  and  nobler  kinds. 

The  better  and  nobler  kind  of  selfish- 
ness is  the  selfishness  with  imagination  in 
it.  One  can  be  selfish  for  one,  like  a  baby 
with  a  bottle  of  milk,  or  one  can  be  selfish 
for  two,  like  a  new  lover,  or  one  can  be 
selfish  for  seven  or  eight,  like  a  mother, 
or  one  can  be  selfish  for  a  city  like 
Jean  Valjean,  or  one  can  be  selfish  and 
identify  oneself,  strike  up  a  mutual  inter- 

186 


est,  with  the  daily  lives  of  eighty  million  imagination 
people,  like  Alexander  Graham  Bell.  nf  her 

Selfishness 

3 

Imagination  and  the  Higher  Selfishness 

The  Honorable  Wayne  MacVeagh  was 
quoted  sometime  ago  as  saying  that  before 
twenty  years  there  would  be  but  two  great 
parties  in  this  country  and  that  by  what- 
ever names  they  misrht  be  called,  one  of 
these  parties  would  be  the  party  of  capital 
and  the  other  would  be  the  party  of  labor. 

If  this  statement  is  true,  it  means  that 
this  country  has  nothing  in  it  but  second- 
rate,  inefficient  millionaires,  and  second- 
rate,  inefficient  laborers. 

If  a  party  that  is  strictly  and  merely  a 
party  of  capital  exists,  all  the  second-rate 
and  inefficient  millionaires  will  belong  to 
it. 

If  a  party  that  is  strictly  and  merely  a 
party  of  labor  exists,  all  the  second-rate 
and  inefficient  laborers  will  belong  to  it. 

There  would  soon  have  to  be  a  third 
187 


inspired       party  in  this  country,  a  party  for  million- 
Millionaires      •          ,1  !  T   •       /V>    • 

aires  that  are  not  second-rate  and  meffici- 
A  Million     ent?  and  for  laborers  who  can  work. 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  Millionaires  who  propose  to  belong  to  a 
party  all  by  themselves  are  inefficient  be- 
cause millionaires  who  have  no  one  to  work 
with  but  other  millionaires,  could  not  get 
things  done.  Laborers  who  have  no  one 
but  other  laborers  to  work  with  could  not 
get  things  to  do. 

It  is  only  the  millionaires  who  do  not 
want  to  do  their  work  as  millionaires  and 
bone  down  to  getting  on  with  people,  and 
to  accomplishing  things,  who  would  want 
to  belong  to  a  party  by  themselves.  And  it 
is  only  laborers  who  are  not  trying  to  do 
their  work  better,  and  who  are  not  trying 
to  amount  to  something,  and  to  be  worth 
more  than  they  get,  who  would  think  of 
belonging  to  a  mere  party  of  labor. 

This  brings  us  to  the  question  at  the 
bottom  of  the  matter.  What  is  the  basis 
of  the  efficiency  of  labor  in  a  great  indus- 
trial nation  like  the  United  States? 

188 


The  basis  of  the  efficiency  of  labor,  imagination 
whether  it  is  the  labor  of  the  rich  or  the  ^  he^ 
labor  of  the  poor,  is  imagination.  Selfishness 

In  our  complex  American  business  con- 
ditions, where  so  many  different  kinds  of 
things  have  to  be  put  together,  men  who 
are  without  imagination  cannot  be  effi- 
cient. To  be  without  imagination  is  un- 
business-like.  Men  who  have  no  imagi- 
nation about  other  men's  minds  quarrel 
with  them  instead  of  working  with  them. 
They  keep  stopping  the  mills  to  fight. 
Men  who  have  no  imagination  about  other 
men's  work  are  inefficient  because  they 
cannot  lay  out  work  that  the  men  could  do. 
Men  who  have  no  imagination  about  their 
own  work  and  who  stop  imagining  or  see- 
ing how  their  work  is  being  done,  and 
how  it  might  be  done,  only  half  do  it. 
They  die  at  forty.  Men  who  stop  imagin- 
ing or  trying  to  keep  alive  in  their  work 
and  who  die  at  forty,  and  yet  who  keep 
on  looking  as  if  they  were  living,  make  a 
great  business  nation  impossible.  The 
189 


inspired       millionaires  and  laborers  who  are  efficient 

Millionaires          ,  *  .  ,1  •,       1 

in  this  country  are  the  men  who  keep  put- 
A  Million     ting  themselves  into  each  other's  places 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  and  making  the  most  of  each  other.  This 
is  an  act  of  the  imagination.  In  the 
Bible,  imagination  is  called  the  Holy 
Ghost.  In  literature  and  the  fine  arts  it 
is  called  genius  or  perhaps  the  artistic 
temperament.  In  business  it  is  called 
common  sense,  the  sense  of  putting  com- 
mon things  together  so  that  they  are 
shown  to  be  extraordinary  and  full  of 
power  and  surprise.  Imagination  ap- 
plied to  iron  means  steel,  applied  to  manu- 
facturing steel  it  means  putting  a  strong 
draught  on  the  creative  powers  of  the  men 
who  are  helping  to  make  the  steel,  and 
bringing  out  the  utmost  glow  and  help  in 
each  of  them.  Applied  imagination  — 
imagination  applied  to  being  a  laborer 
and  to  being  a  millionaire  are  the  two 
magnetic  forces  that  run  the  dynamo  of 
the  business  world.  All  of  the  best  men 
are  full  of  it.  The  laboring  man  who  is 
190 


a  little  inspired  and  is  creating  values  and  imagination 
the  millionaire  who  is  a  little  inspired  and        *® 


is  creating  values  are  moved  by  the  same  Selfishness 
spirit.  The  really  inspired  laborer  is  not 
begrudging  the  really  inspired  millionaire 
his  automobile.  He  looks  at  it  as  it  whirls 
by,  thinks  how  the  man  earned  it  and  how 
he  will  earn  one,  too.  The  two  men  at 
bottom  feel  that  they  are  alike.  They 
are  the  last  men  to  hate  each  other  and  not 
to  work  together.  The  real  enemy  of  the 
laborer  is  not  the  man  in  the  automobile 
who  works  as  hard  as  he  can,  but  the 
laborer  next  to  him  who  works  as  little  as 
possible.  The  trouble  with  the  laborers 
in  our  country  is  not  that  the  millionaire 
is  against  them,  but  that  they  are  against 
each  other,  and  that  the  men  who  cannot 
do  things  are  in  a  vast  conspiracy  of  keep- 
ing them  from  being  done  by  the  men  who 
can.  The  real  tragedy  of  labor  —  the 
oppression  of  the  poor  —  is  the  mob  of 
weak  men  intimidating  the  strong.  The 
natural  division  of  parties  in  the  business 
191 


inspired       world  has  come  to  be  not  between  rich 

and  poor  or  even  between  right  and  wrong 

A  Million     or  selfish  and  unselfish,  but  between  men 

Dollars  as  an  . 

Art  Form  who  are  creating  values  and  men  who  are 
not.  When  they  do  not  work  together  it 
is  because  the  millionaire  is  a  case  of 
arrested  development.  He  began  by 
being  an  inspired  laborer  and  has  forgot- 
ten. He  was  once  a  man  who  was  being 
inspired  with  something  worth  a  million 
dollars  and  when  his  million  dollars  was 
paid  in,  he  stopped.  The  millionaire  who 
keeps  as  much  ahead  as  a  millionaire  as  he 
used  to  keep  as  an  inspired  laborer  finds 
that  his  men  feel  identified  with  him  or 
trust  him.  The  more  he  makes  being  a 
millionaire  look  original  and  interesting 
and  better  than  other  millionaires  have 
made  it  look,  the  more  they  work.  It  is 
the  hard  labor  of  the  rich  that  can  get  the 
hard  labor  of  the  poor.  A  manufac- 
turer can  have  all  the  success  he  wants 
who  has  made  a  success  of  his  factory  by 
being  a  working  millionaire,  by  having 


inspirations  himself  and  by  going  about  imagination 
in  it  lifting  off  the  lid  from  other  people's.  ^ighe^ 
It  is  his  putting  down  the  lid  on  other  Selfishness 
people's  and  sitting  on  it,  that  makes  the 
millionaire  unpopular.  The  moment  he 
gets  up  and  helps,  they  like  him.  They 
like  him  when  he  does  not  help  and  merely 
gets  up.  Our  manufacturing  towns  are 
trying  hard  every  day  to  believe  a  man 
can  be  good  enough  to  be  rich  and  they 
are  even  willing  to  stand  by  and  let  a  man 
have  money  to  throw  away,  if  he  is  not 
using  it  to  throw  men  away.  In  the  last 
analysis,  in  a  machine  civilization  the 
skilled  labor  of  the  rich  consists  in  finding 
ways  in  factories  of  not  throwing  men 
away. 

The  man  who  is  clicking  off  the  middle 
of  this  sentence  to  you,  Gentle  Reader,  on 
the  linotype  machine,  does  not  know  it  is 
about  him  probably.  If  it  were  his  own 
autobiography  he  would  not  notice. 
Where  is  the  author  —  which  of  us  is 
193 


inspired       there  who  is  trying  to  be  an  author  to-day, 

8  who  could  hope  to  stop  a  proof-reader  in 

A  Million     his  mad  career  of  correctness  down  the 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  Page,  who  could  hope  to  get  in  a  word 
with  him  just  of  our  own  as  we  went  by, 
or  whisper  to  him  as  a  brother,  so  that  we 
two  might  stop  a  second  perhaps,  and  be 
glad  together?  We  are  filed  away  in 
machines  and  partitioned  off  in  specialties. 
We  live  hours  every  day,  most  of  us,  in  the 
hold  of  the  world,  or  under  water  in 
work,  and  we  are  not  free  and  strong  and 
human,  and  up  in  the  light  with  it.  And 
what  I  am  hoping  for  in  this  book  is  not 
that  we  should  all  elbow  our  way  together 
into  the  Pilot  House  all  the  time,  or  walk 
'superior  up  above  and  to  and  fro  on  the 
Bridge  of  Things,  but  that  we  should  all 
have  turns  of  looking  from  the  pilot's 
window  at  the  course  of  the  ship,  and 
turns  of  walking  up  and  down  the  deck 
in  the  broad  day,  and  in  the  solemn  night. 
Then  we  would  go  down  again  and  with 
the  seas  and  with  the  stars  around  us  we 
would  do  our  work. 

194 


A  man  who  does  a  part  of  a  thing  can  imagination 
not  do  it  as  well  or  as  long,  unless  he  has  Monopoly 
at  times  the  vision  of  the  others  and  of  the 
whole.  A  millionaire  becomes  no  better 
than  a  mere  factory-hand  without  this, 
and  a  factory-hand  becomes  no  better 
than  a  mere  millionaire.  What  seems  to 
be  wanted  in  the  men  who  conduct  our  in- 
dustries is  not  altruism,  but  a  more  com- 
prehending, comprehensive,  inclusive  self- 
ishness—  the  selfishness  that  includes 
others  and  is  full  of  shrewd  mutualness 
and  of  a  passion  for  putting  one's  own 
interests  and  the  interests  of  others 
together. 

4 
Imagination  and  Monopoly 

It  has  been  said  that  the  quality  that 
makes  a  million  dollars  an  art- form  is 
imagination.  The  imagination,  when  it  is 
seen  working  in  full  force  in  a  millionaire, 
works  through  into  three  phases: 

Invention.     It  makes   him   see   some- 
thing people  ought  to  want. 
195 


inspired          Mutualncss.     It  makes  him  see  men 

Millionaires  .•      i  .1      .   i  t     i 

creatively,  so  that  he  can  get  men  to  help 
A  Million     him  make  it.     It  makes  him  see  men  cre- 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  atively,  so  that  he  can  get  men  to  want  it 
and  buy  it. 

Monopoly.  It  makes  him  see,  like  any 
other  artist,  that  if  the  thing  he  has 
thought  of  is  to  be  made  perfectly,  and 
if  it  is  to  be  of  the  most  perfect  service  to 
the  people  for  whom  he  has  thought  of  it, 
it  must  be  kept  in  his  own  hands  or  where 
he  can  see  that  his  original  design  is  car- 
ried out. 

Mr.  Edison  has  announced  that  his  new 
invention,  which  will  make  it  possible  for 
any  workman  to  have  a  new  concrete 
house  complete,  costing  only  a  thousand 
dollars,  is  a  sheer  gift  to  the  world  and  is 
not  to  be  patented.  Anybody  can  make 
use  of  it.  Mr.  Edison's  idea  has  been 
that  he  will  be  benevolent  and  not  make 
money  out  of  his  invention  himself. 

If  Mr.  Edison  were  persuaded  not  to 
be  benevolent,  or  rather  benevolent-look- 
196 


ing,  in  this  matter,  and  would  consent  to  imagination 
keep  his  invention  of  a  house  for  nothing,  Monopoly 
in  his  own  hands,  he  would  have  the  chance 
to  make  the  most  original  gift  to  the 
world,  the  world  has  ever  had  —  a  great, 
new  and  free-born  industry.  As  it  is  the 
world  is  going  to  have,  apparently,  from 
perhaps  its  greatest  inventive  genius,  one 
more  industry  as  brutal  and  as  helpless 
and  as  monotonous  as  the  rest.  As  some 
of  us  see  it,  it  is  a  thoughtless  thing  to  do 
to  stand  up  kindly  in  a  country  and  dis- 
tribute several  million  dollars  a  year  with 
one's  eyes  shut.  Mr.  Edison  is  standing 
ing  in  his  house  at  his  desk  by  an 
open  window,  a  bushel-basketful  of 
fortunes  at  his  right  hand,  and  he 
is  absent-mindedly  tossing  them  —  big 
handf  uls  of  them  —  out  through  the  win- 
dow to  people.  He  has  selected  the  peo- 
ple who  happen  to  be  going  by  for  for- 
tunes, and  among  all  these  the  bullies  and 
the  boys  who  can  pound  the  hardest,  or 
grab  the  quickest,  are  the  ones  he  has 
selected  the  fortunes  for  first. 
197 


inspired  If  Mr.  Edison  could  be  prevailed  upon 

to  look  more  selfish  for  the  time  being  and 

A  Million     jf  he  would  keep  his  idea  of  a  thousand- 
Dollars  as  an 
Art  Form     dollar  concrete  house  in  his  own  hands,  the 

laborers  who  help  to  make  the  houses  could 
be  paid  more  and  treated  better  than  any 
other  class  of  laborers  working  on  any 
other  invention  in  the  world.  All  the  men 
in  the  industry  would  be  pulling  up  in- 
stead of  pulling  down  on  the  other  indus- 
tries of  the  world.  Mr.  Edison's  whole 
industry,  with  its  millions  of  men  in  it, 
could  be  conducted  from  the  bottom  to  the 
top  by  a  great,  free,  self-respecting,  self- 
controlled  man.  Mr.  Edison,  or  his  trus- 
tee, would  be  in  a  position  to  conduct  a 
great  business  without  fear  or  favor,  with- 
out whining,  and  without  explaining,  as 
most  of  us  have  to  do,  that  he  wanted  to 
do  right  in  business  —  had  always  wanted 
to,  but  nobody  would  let  him.  He  would 
not  have  to  explain  that  he  wanted  to  em- 
ploy better  foremen  —  foremen  who  had 
natural  gifts  and  who  could  exploit  and 
198 


make  the  most  of  men  —  that  he  had  imagination 
wanted  to  employ  a  higher  type  of  super-  Monopoly 
intendents,  and  that  he  had  wanted  to  be 
a  gentleman  and  an  artist  and  do  as  he 
liked,  and  carry  out  his  own  idea  and  con- 
duct a  great,  dignified  business,  —  but 
nobody  would  let  him.  He  would  not  be 
feeling  it  every  time  he  went  down  to  the 
office  like  a  threat  held  over  him  day  after 
day,  that  what  he  did  in  his  business  was 
not  being  determined  by  the  fact  that  he 
wanted  it,  but  by  the  fact  that  there  hap- 
pened to  be  in  the  world  men  who  would 
do  meaner  things  than  he  would. 

When  Phidias  was  doing  the  Athena 
on  the  Parthenon,  if  a  committee  from  the 
Legislature  had  waited  on  him  and  inter- 
rupted him  and  said  they  wanted  to  use  his 
chisel  a  while,  a  few  of  them,  or  that 
they  had  found  someone  who  could  do  an 
Athena  cheaper,  and  who  had  underbid 
him,  Phidias  would  have  insisted  that  he 
had  a  great  conception  for  Athens  and 
that  no  other  man  had  conceived  it  and 
199 


inspired       that  no  other  man  could  carry  it  out,  and 

*  the  probabilities  are  that,  being  the  man 

A  Million     he  was,  he  would  have  been  able  to  make 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form       people  bellCVC  it. 

The  moment  the  millionaire  applies  his 
imagination  to  the  perfection  of  service 
and  tries  to  give  it  unity  and  harmony  and 
validity,  monopoly  follows.  The  moment 
he  seeks  to  carry  out  an  original  or  crea- 
tive idea,  to  protect  his  employees  and  to 
protect  the  public  in  it,  he  finds  he  must 
keep  things  in  his  own  hands  and  carry 
out  his  own  design  like  any  other  artist. 
This  seems  to  be  the  first  reason  for  mo- 
nopoly. The  millionaire  wants  it. 

The  second  reason  for  monopoly  is  that 
society  wants  it.  The  moment  the  world 
begins  to  apply  its  imagination  to  getting 
what  it  wants  out  of  its  millionaires,  it  dis- 
covers that  it  is  much  easier  to  get  what  it 
wants  out  of  a  monopoly,  that  is,  out  of 
one  self -controlled  millionaire,  or  group 
of  millionaires,  than  it  is  to  get  what  it 
wants  out  of  crowds  of  millionaires  who 

aoo 


none  of  them  do  as  they  like.     Men  who  imagination 
cannot  do  as  they  like  are  not  responsible  Monopoly 
and   cannot   be   blamed   and   cannot   be 
praised.     One    of   the   next   things   this 
country  is  going  to  do  is  to  put  its  mil- 
lionaires where  they  can  be  all  done  up 
compactly  and  dealt  with  conveniently  as 
monopolists,    and    can  be    praised    and 
blamed  and  held  responsible. 

The  third  reason  for  monopoly  is  that 
when  the  imagination  is  applied  to  con- 
ducting the  business  of  a  great  country, 
it  is  only  by  monopoly,  by  strong  million- 
aires who  can  do  as  they  like,  that  socialism 
can  be  dealt  with.  The  millionaires  are 
the  men  who  are  going  to  put  socialism  in 
a  sieve,  and  have  all  that  is  true  and  good 
in  it  sifted  out  before  the  people  and  used 
for  them,  and  all  that  is  bad  in  it  or  that 
came  from  machine-made  men  or  from 
dull,  discouraged  factory  minds  cast  out 
forever  upon  the  scrap  heap  of  the  world. 


Inspired 
Millionaires 

A  Million         What  seems  to  be  good  in  socialism  is 

Dollars  as  an . 

Art  Form  its  spirit,  the  idea  that  every  man  must  be 
thought  of  and  represented;  and  what 
seems  to  be  bad  in  it  is  the  letter,  the  idea 
that  all  these  crowds  of  men  must  do  these 
things  themselves,  for  .themselves,  and 
that  unless  a  man  in  this  country  repre- 
sents his  own  point  of  view  himself,  no 
one  will  do  it. 

If  there  should  ever  come  to  be  a  time 
when  there  is  nobody  to  represent  a  man 
but  himself,  in  this  country,  we  will  have  to 
fall  back  upon  socialism  in  the  letter.  In 
the  meantime  our  unpredatory  millionaires, 
or  millionaires  of  the  first  class,  the  ones 
who  have  thought  of  things  and  created 
values  and  who  have  not  merely  grabbed 
or  crowded,  are  all  of  them  men  who  have 
become  millionaires  by  taking  other  peo- 
ple's points  of  view,  and  they  are  able  to 
keep  on  being  millionaires  because  they 
know  what  millions  of  people  want  and 


what  millions  of  people  think.  If  one  The 
were  to  go  through  the  nation  and  pick 
out  the  men  who  had  the  greatest  power 
of  seeing  things  in  a  large  way  and  from 
everybody's  point  of  view,  and  of  doing 
something  about  it,  a  large  proportion  of 
them  would  be  found  to  be  the  men  who 
are  managing  and  moving  around  the 
money  on  the  world.  We  have  given  over 
the  power  into  their  hands  because  they 
have  known  how  to  put  more  men's  inter- 
ests together  than  we  do.  They  may  be 
selfish.  So  are  we.  One  can  look  about 
almost  any  day  and  see  a  selfish  man. 
One  man  is  selfish  his  own  size.  Another 
man  is  selfish  town-size,  another  nation- 
size,  and  now  and  then  there  is  a  man 
who  braids  in  his  desires  with  the  people 
of  all  nations,  who  reaches  around  a  world 
and  grapples  with  all  of  it.  If  he  will 
hold  it  steady  for  the  rest  of  us,  we  may 
count  ourselves  happy.  The  socialists, 
who  are  largely  men  who  have  time  to 
think  only  of  themselves,  would  make 

203 


inspired       poor    work    of    it.      For    that    matter, 

Millionaires    • «         «  •    i  •    •  i 

if    what    socialists    want    to    do    is    to 
A  Million     bring  socialism  to  pass,  the  best  thine: 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  they  could  do  would  be  to  pick  out  mil- 
lionaires and  get  them  to  do  it  for  them. 
It  is  the  millionaires  who  understand 
socialism.  They  have  worked  through  to 
more  of  the  truth  in  it,  and  they  have  more 
of  an  idea  of  how  to  handle  it,  than  other 
people,  and  of  how  to  make  the  truth  work. 
It  was  by  divining  society,  by  practicing 
the  spirit  of  socialism,  and  by  making  the 
truth  work,  that  the  best  of  them  have  suc- 
ceeded as  well  as  they  have,  and  it  is  by 
starting  a  back  fire  of  socialism  among 
our  millionaires  that  all  that  is  bad  in 
socialism  is  going  to  be  headed  off  and 
that  all  that  is  good  in  it  is  going  to  be 
set  to  work.  Our  next  great  million- 
aires are  going  to  take  the  things  that 
the  socialists  are  saying  about  them  and 
say  them  better.  They  can  when  they 
want  to.  More  people  will  listen  to  them 
and  they  can  do  things  as  well  as  talk 

104 


about  them.  The  trouble  with  socialists  The 
is  that  nearly  everybody  is  being  a  socialist 
for  somebody  else.  Socialism  has  always 
been  something  that  someone  else  ought 
to  do  and  the  millionaires  are  men  who  are 
in  a  position  to  do  their  socialism  them- 
selves. Every  millionaire  his  own  social- 
ist is  the  next  motto  and  the  next  pro- 
gram of  the  world. 

As  a  threat  and  as  a  last  resort  —  and 
as  temporary  scaffolding  —  it  would  be 
hard  to  overlook  the  value  of  the  popu- 
lar socialism.  But  in  the  long  run  our  peo- 
ple are  not  going  to  want  socialism  in  this 
country,  because  monopolists  can  be  bet- 
ter socialists  for  them  than  they  can.  This 
is  the  first  reason  why  the  people  are  going 
to  prefer  the  socialized  millionaire  —  a 
million  dollars  as  an  art- form  —  to  social- 
ism. 

The  second  reason  why  the  people  are 
going  to  prefer  a  million  dollars  as  an  art- 
form  —  the  socialized  millionaire  —  to 
socialism,  is  that  as  compared  with  a  social- 
ized millionaire,  socialism  is  undemocratic. 

105 


inspired       Eighty  million  people  do  not  want  to  do 

all  of  everything  themselves.     We  want 

A  Million     to  be  f  pee  in  a  democracy  and  trust  people. 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  We  want  to  be  led  by  men  who  are  on  the 
lookout  farther  ahead  for  the  rest  of  us, 
and  who  have  to  be.  We  do  not  want  to 
take  time  ourselves  to  be  always  climbing 
up  to  the  Senate.  We  do  not  even  want 
to  watch  it,  and  the  last  thing  we  would 
enjoy  as  live,  busy  people,  would 
be  standing  there  on  the  height  or  on  the 
look-off  day  after  day,  seeing  for 
everybody.  We  have  our  own  special 
things  to  do  that  we  like  to  do 
best,  and  what  a  democracy  is  for  is  to 
let  us  do  them.  A  democracy  is  supposed 
to  be  a  contrivance  for  having  every  man 
represented  —  millions  of  small  men 
summed  up  in  a  few  convenient  big  ones. 
Masses  not  only  cannot  do  things,  but  they 
do  not  want  to,  and  it  is  only  through  men 
who  sum  up  masses  and  who  represent 
them  that  a  great  nation  can  hope  to 
achieve  great  things  in  the  world.  To 
206 


deny  millionaires  in  America  is  to  deny  More 
America.  The  only  fair  question  about 
a  millionaire  in  America  is  "Is  he  really  Monopoly 
an  American?  Is  he  handling  the  money 
that  is  in  his  hands  and  that  has  been 
placed  there  by  natural  selection  as  the 
trustee  for  all  of  us,  or  will  we  have  to 
step  in  and  meddle  with  him  and  insist  and 
quarrel  with  him  and  represent  ourselves?" 
The  American  democracy  had  always  been 
supposed  to  be,  before  this,  a  great  democ- 
racy, not  a  little,  inconvenient  one  like 
Athens,  where  every  man  had  to  do  and 
know  everything;  but  a  really  great 
democracy,  a  country  where  every  man 
feels  that  he  has  been  left  free  to  develop 
himself,  to  make  the  most  of  his  own 
bent  in  the  world,  a  country  where  it  is 
safe  for  a  man  to  mind  his  own  business. 

6 

More  Imagination  and  More  Monopoly 

Another  reason  why  the  people  are  go- 
ing to  work  things  out  into  monopoly,  is 

aoy 


inspired       that  if  a  millionaire  is  a  monopolist,  or  is 

Millionaires          ,    .  ...  •,  ,  , 

put  in  a  position  where  he  can  do  wrong, 
A  Million     doing  right  is  going  to  be  made  some  ob- 

Dollarsasan  . 

Art  Form  jcct  to  him.  It  means  something  and  be- 
comes a  self -expressive  act.  People  all 
know  him  through  it.  He  has  the  pleas- 
ure of  being  received  as  a  comrade,  a  big 
brother  of  the  world.  If  he  is  driven  to 
doing  right  he  does  not  mean  anything 
by  it,  and  a  man  who  does  not  mean  what 
he  does,  does  not  do  it  well.  One  of  the 
next  things  we  are  going  to  discover  in 
America  is  that  we  must  drop  our 
national,  bullying  attitude  and  quiet  down 
a  little  with  our  millionaires.  We  must 
stop  making  our  millionaires  do  right. 
We  will  merely  spoil  them.  They  must 
make  themselves  do  it.  Then  it  will 
mount  up  and  will  come  to  something. 
Millionaires  are  like  other  people,  and  peo- 
ple who  are  made  to  do  a  thing,  do  as  little 
of  it  as  possible.  It  is  only  the  second- 
rate  millionaires  who  can  be  driven  and 
they  will  only  do  the  second-rate,  the  mor- 


ally-economical,  sorts  of  things.  People  More 
who  do  second-rate  things  are  almost 
always  people  who  are  trying  to  do  things  Monopoly 
from  the  outside,  because  they  feel  driven 
to  it.  We  are  making  it  to-day  very 
difficult  for  millionaires  to  be  good. 
Nine  times  out  of  ten  that  people  say  any- 
thing about  a  millionaire,  it  is  about 
things  he  ought  not  to  do.  Millionaires 
are  naturally  not  inspired  by  a  program 
of  things  they  ought  not  to  do.  We 
could  not  do  anything  ourselves,  most  of 
us,  with  a  list  of  things  not  to  do,  except  to 
pick  out  those  we  do  not  want  to  not-do 
the  most  and  not-do  those.  The  trouble 
seems  to  be  that  in  dealing  with  our  mil- 
lionaires we  do  not  treat  them  as  if  they 
were  human  beings.  Why  not  let  our 
millionaires  be  selfish  like  other  people, 
and  human?  Why  not  see  to  it  that  their 
selfishness  is  allowed  to  develop,  that  is, 
have  more  imagination  in  it  and  include 
the  rest  of  us? 

Uncle  Joe  Cannon,  in  the  days  before 

ao9 


inspired       he  was  made  speaker  of  the  House,  was 

offered  indirectly  a  bribe  of  two  hundred 

A  Million     an(j  fifty  thousand  dollars  and  when  he 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  was  asked  why  he  did  not  take  it,  he  re- 
plied that  he  would  not  have  been  com- 
fortable. He  did  not  like  the  idea  of  hav- 
ing to  spend  all  the  rest  of  his  life,  he  said, 
with  a  thief.  He  did  not  take  any  credit 
for  having  done  the  right  thing  and  the 
only  real  credit  in  it  was  that  the  right 
thing  was  comfortable  to  him.  Possibly 
something  of  this  sort  is  going  to  take 
place  with  our  millionaires.  They  are 
going  to  be  right  because  they  like  it  bet- 
ter. The  righteous  man  is  covetous  for 
the  right.  The  sincere  man  is  greedy  for 
sincerity;  he  wants  all  he  can  get  both  for 
himself  and  for  others,  and  the  man  who 
is  an  artist  with  a  million  dollars,  who 
makes  it  an  art- form  both  in  making  it 
and  spending  it,  has  as  his  supreme  self- 
indulgence  his  passion  for  identity  or  for 
mutual  selfishness  with  the  world,  his  pas- 
sion not  for  accumulating,  but  for  inter- 


weaving  his  interests  with  the  interests  of  More 
others.  He  likes  to  think  that  he  is  mak- 
ing  his  mind  and  his  money  a  part  of  the  Monopoly 
fate  of  nations,  that  he  is  making  his  mind 
and  his  money  like  the  rivers  and  the 
mountains,  a  part  of  the  furnishings  of  the 
earth,  a  part  of  the  working,  every-day 
equipment  of  a  planet.  And  we  like  to 
have  him  think  so.  We  like  to  have  him 
living  up  to  it.  There  is  no  more  organic 
daily  need  in  the  hearts  of  men  in  this 
world  to-day,  than  to  have  men  in  it  that 
they  know  are  greater  than  they  are,  and 
that  they  would  like  to  be  like.  Men  who 
see  the  wider  and  deeper  forces  about 
them,  who  daily  handle  them  with  their 
hands,  men  who  lift  up  railroads  and  mow 
down  mountains,  men  who  give  nations 
things  to  do,  and  pile  their  minds  up  in 
glass  and  steel  against  the  sky,  and  who 
build  streets  under  the  sea,  and  who  swing 
the  cities  in  their  orbits  —  these  men  may 
not  be  perfect,  they  may  not  be  arch- 
angels in  all  the  details,  but  they  serve  a 


inspired       daily  need  of  the  human  race  and  bring 

to  all  of  us  that  touch  of  wonder  or  even 

A  Million     Of  worship  in  our  thoughts  which  makes 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  us  proud  of  the  world  while  we  work,  and 
which  fills  us  with  a  kind  of  patriotism  for 
the  human  race  and  for  what  men  can 
do  on  a  planet  like  this,  and  what  they  can 
be  on  it,  and  for  what  we  shall  do  and  be 
ourselves. 

It  is  all  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  the 
average  man's  special  inspiration  and  joy 
consists  in  standing  up  for  the  average 
man.  And  it  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that 
he  has  any  special  inspiration  for  being 
one.  The  only  thing  that  is  really 
inspiring  to  the  average  man  to-day 
is  having  something  above  him  that 
needs  his  best,  that  expects  him  to 
be  better  than  he  is,  and  that  keeps 
him  from  being  an  average  man  any 
longer  than  can  be  helped.  Except  when 
he  is  under  temporary  illusion  or  violence, 
the  average  man  for  whom  socialism  has 
been  invented  resents  equality  or  levelness 
with  all  his  heart.  A  level  and  a  fair 


chance  for  all  men,  not  to  be  equal,  is  what  More 

i  -,.,  Imagination 

he  really  wants.  and  More 

When  he  goes  out  to  walk  in  Hyde  Monopoly 
Park  or  on  Riverside  Drive  and  sees  the 
miles  of  beautiful  horses,  it  is  a  part  of  the 
beauty  and  the  pleasure  of  it  all  to  him 
that  society  has  supplied  these  particular 
people  with  horses  and  with  carriages,  be- 
cause they  have  done  more  things  for  the 
world,  that  the  world  wanted,  than  the 
other  people  have  done.  Except  under 
temporary  conditions  and  when  looked  at 
in  the  large,  a  great  house  on  the  avenue 
is  a  receipt  from  society  for  value  re- 
ceived. The  temporary  disgrace  of 
wealth  lies  not  in  the  wealth  but  in  its 
diseases.  Inasmuch  as  some  men  we 
know,  are  rich,  the  world  must  have  wanted 
the  wrong  things  or  wanted  them  in  the 
wrong  way.  But  as  fast  as  society  is  be- 
ginning to  want  the  right  things  and  want 
them  in  the  right  way,  a  man's  horse  or 
carriage  in  the  Park  is  going  to  be  looked 
upon  like  a  lordship  or  a  decoration.  It 


inspired       will  be  like  being  given  the  freedom  of  a 

Millionaires      .,  *  ,      -,  •*  . 

city.     A  man  s  horse  and  carriage  is  a 
A  Million     special    understanding   with   the    people 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  around  him  and  with  the  world,  that,  con- 
sidering all  he  has  done  in  it,  he  need  not 
walk. 

The  general  effect  of  a  thousand  horses 
and  carriages  in  the  Park  on  a  good  work- 
man is  to  make  him  work.  Looked  at 
in  any  large  or  fair  way,  the  presence  of 
great  minds  in  the  world  makes  men 
thoughtful,  and  the  presence  of  great  for- 
tunes makes  them  rich.  The  earth  is  full 
of  din  and  of  thought  and  smoke  and  of 
men  making  things,  and  the  great  fortunes 
throughout  the  country  are  the  draught 
that  glow  up  society  all  through,  and  that 
keep  every  inch  of  it  alive,  moving,  shap- 
ing, and  welding  the  things  that  shall  be. 
Millionaires  are  the  bellows  of  great  cities, 
the  draught  on  the  creative  forces  and  the 
latent  energies  of  men. 

Millionaires  are  the  tall  chimneys  on  the 
world. 

214 


Everything  that  a  true  or  socialized  More 
millionaire  does  becomes  the  common  in- 
spiration  of  all  of  us.  If  a  millionaire  is  Monopoly 
really  an  artist,  if  he  has  shown  it  by  mak- 
ing the  men  and  the  materials  around  him 
glow  more  than  other  men  could,  no  one 
will  find  fault  with  him  very  long  for  be- 
ing a  monopolist.  He  will  be  regarded 
as  having  been  appointed  to  the  position 
by  a  fair,  free-for-all  natural  selection, 
by  the  men  who  work  with  him.  He  has 
turned  out  to  be  the  artist  who  has  com- 
bined and  freed  them  all  and  expressed 
them  and  made  them  come  to  themselves. 
When  we  have  more  millionaires  like  this, 
men  who  have  proved  themselves  artists, 
who  hold  their  wealth  as  trustees  of  soci- 
ety, we  will  stop  thinking  of  socialism,  or 
of  groping  for  the  leaders  of  the  world 
in  ballot  boxes.  The  man  who  handles 
his  riches  in  such  a  way  that  if  he  were  to 
insist  upon  giving  them  up  people  would 
insist  upon  his  taking  them  back,  leaves 
socialism  or  groping  in  ballot  boxes  noth- 


inspired       ing  to  do.     If  a  man's  million  dollars  has 

Millionaires   .  •••••,  i  re         M 

imagination  in  it  and  say      we      care- 
A  Million     fully,  he  can  be  rich.     If  his  million  dol- 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  lars  has  enough  imagination  in  it  to  say 
"  we "  voluntarily  and  spontaneously, 
he  can  be  a  monopolist,  and  the  more  of  a 
monopolist  he  is  the  more  people  like  it. 

7 
Millionaires  Who  Invent  People 

There  are  several  kinds  of  men  with 
imagination  in  business. 

Those  who  invent  trade-conveniences 
and  economies,  the  creative  merchants, 
brokers,  storekeepers. 

Those  who  invent  machines  and  whose 
imaginations  play  in  the  laws  of  physics. 

Those  who  invent  new  materials  and 
whose  imaginations  play  around  the  things 
that  come  out  of  the  earth,  the  men  who 
make  new  combinations  of  the  elements, 
who  are  poets  in  chemistry,  or  botany  and 
mineralogy. 

Those  who  invent  people. 
216 


Men  whose  imaginations  belong  to  Millionaires 
these  four  different  classes  are  apt  to  con-  Peo°lenv' 
fine  themselves  merely  to  one  of  them. 
Edison  has  little  imagination  about  men 
who  are  entangled  in  industrial  wrongs. 
His  imagination  plays  about  electricity 
and  not  about  the  men  who  work  with  it. 
Alexander  Graham  Bell  had  very  little 
imagination  with  regard  to  making  men 
see  that  they  wanted  telephones.  Thoreau 
made  the  best  lead  pencil  in  the  United 
States,  but  his  imagination  came  to  a  full 
stop.  He  did  not  care  about  selling  it. 
The  special  need  in  the  industrial  world 
for  the  inspired  millionaire  is  that  he  is 
the  man  who  puts  all  the  other  men's 
imaginations  together.  He  has  creative 
power  in  getting,  holding,  and  discovering 
for  the  things  that  these  men  invent,  the 
people  who  can  finish  them  for  them, 
and  who  can  give  them  their  real  value  in 
the  world.  The  special  function  of  the  in- 
spired millionaire  as  he  looks  over  the 
field  of  invention,  is  inventing  people. 


inspired       People   are   the   most   necessary   of   the 

Millionaires    .  ..  mi  T  -,  ,, 

inventions.     They    make    and    use    the 

A  Million       others. 
Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  Nearly  all  our  great  millionaires  were 
invented  by  some  other  millionaire  who 
saw  what  was  in  them  and  saw  how  it 
could  be  combined  and  released  and  put 
in  action.  We  look  to  our  millionaires  in 
each  generation  to  invent  our  new  ones. 
Carnegie  and  Marshall  Field  and  hun- 
dreds of  others  succeeded  largely  by  dis- 
covering and  inventing  men  to  be  rich 
with  them,  men  who  could  be  fellow-mil- 
lionaires arid  partners  in  creating  the  great 
values  of  the  world. 

For  every  single  thing  that  a  creative 
millionaire  thinks  and  does,  he  sees  ten 
things  he  might  do,  ten  fortunes  that  he 
might  make,  if  he  could  invent  or  discover 
ten  more  people  to  have  them.  Some- 
times it  seems  as  if  there  were  getting  to 
be  but  one  really  serious,  industrial  prob- 
lem in  America,  and  that  is  the  inefficiency 
of  labor.  Thousands  of  new  and  un- 
218 


precedented  positions  in  this  country,  Millionaires 
worth  from  ten  thousand  to  a  hundred  Pe0plenv 
thousand  a  year,  are  vacant  because  men 
cannot  be  found  to  fill  them.  The  man 
who  can  earn  a  hundred  thousand  a  year, 
that  is,  who  can  do  a  hundred  thousand 
dollars'  worth  of  labor,  who  can  literally 
save  all  the  men  of  the  world,  poor  and 
rich,  many  times  that  sum  by  the  way  he 
fills  his  position,  and  by  the  things  he 
thinks  of  in  it  and  is  creative  enough  to 
carry  through  —  is  almost  impossible  to 
find.  Most  of  the  men  who  apply  for 
such  positions  have  not  the  efficiency  or 
imagination  to  fill  them  and  over- 
flow them  and  make  not  only  themselves 
but  their  positions  a  new  thing  in  the 
world.  The  creative  millionaire  is  hedged 
in  on  every  side  either  by  the  inefficiency 
of  labor  among  the  rich  or  the  inefficiency 
of  labor  among  the  poor.  He  has  things 
for  people  to  do  and  he  wants  men  at  four 
dollars  a  day,  forty  dollars  a  day,  or  four 
hundred  dollars  a  day,  and  he  cannot  find 


inspired       men  who  seem  to  be  interested  in  the 

8  things  enough  to  do  them.     He  can  only 

A  Million     fin(j  men  wno  are  interested  in  the  four 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  dollars,  or  the  forty  dollars,  or  the  four 
hundred  dollars  a  day.  Nine  men  out  of 
ten  in  the  factories  are  not  interested  in 
working.  They  are  working  as  little  as 
possible  for  their  money.  They  do  not 
seem  to  be  interested  hour  by  hour,  or  day 
by  day,  as  they  work,  in  creating  values. 
They  are  merely  interested  in  getting  all 
the  values  they  can  that  other  people 
have  created.  We  are  seeing  the  whole 
population  of  America  honeycombed  with 
labor  unions  or  vast  organizations  for 
higher  wages,  conspiracies  of  poor  men 
for  not  working  so  hard,  and  for  intimi- 
dating men  who  want  to  work  harder,  and 
we  are  seeing  it  honeycombed  with  trusts, 
vast  organizations  of  rich  men  for  higher 
wages,  for  not  working  so  hard  and  for 
intimidating  the  creative  millionaires  who 
want  to  work  harder. 

There  is  but  one  explanation  for  the  up- 


rising  against  labor  in  this  country  among  Millionaires 
the  very  rich  and  the  very  poor,  and  for  the  Peo°lenv 
general  inefficiency  of  labor  which  con- 
fronts the  creative  millionaire  and  the  cre- 
ative foreman  or  manager  at  every  point 
to-day,  and  that  seems  to  be  that  for  the 
first  time  in  the  history  of  the  world,  the 
experiment  has  been  tried  of  having  two 
or  three  almost  complete  generations  of 
men  who  have  lived  their  lives  with  ma- 
chines and  who  have  given  up  having 
souls,  but  who  have  not  given  up  having 
children.  Children  that  have  been  begot- 
ten and  conceived  in  weariness  and  dull- 
ness, that  have  been  born  and  brought  up 
in  factories,  and  with  factory  fathers  and 
factory  mothers,  who  have  received  their 
education  from  mechanical  school-teach- 
ers and  who  have  received  their  religion 
from  mechanical  churches,  do  not  furnish 
a  population  from  which  the  national  sup- 
ply of  men  who  earn  four  hundred  dollars 
a  day  (in  creating  opportunities  for 
others)  can  be  replenished.  The  men  who 


inspired       can  earn  two  dollars  a  day  and  who  want 

Millionaires    «  , , 

tour  are  the  ones  we  are  the  most  likely 
A  Million     to    succeed    in    getting,     or  who    earn 

Dollars  as  an 

Art  Form  twenty  and  want  forty,  or  who  are 
millionaires  and  do  not  work,  and 
who  merely  do  what  other  millionaires 
would  do  and  are  mere  mechanics  with 
money.  So  we  are  brought  inevitably  to 
the  special  function  of  the  creative  mil- 
lionaire in  a  world  of  machines,  namely, 
inventing  people  and  discovering  and  res- 
cuing those  who  are  already  partly  in- 
vented, and  who  merely  need  to  be  put  in 
place.  The  inventor-class  in  a  factory  is 
the  most  difficult  and  important  class  not 
to  throw  away.  Men  who  are  creative  in 
the  arts  or  in  literature  are  assertive  and 
can  be  depended  on  not  to  let  themselves 
be  thrown  away,  but  if  a  man  has  it  in  him 
to  take  two  hundred  thousand  locomotives 
off  the  tracks  of  the  world  and  quietly  put 
in  electric  motors  instead,  the  chances  are 
half  and  half  that  he  could  be  headed  off 
as  well  as  not  by  a  stupid  foreman,  while 


in  the  making,  or  by  a  year  in  the  factory.  Millionaires 
If  anyone  could  go  through  the  factories 
of  the  world  and  in  some  secret  way  could 
compile  a  list  of  the  inventors  the  factories 
have  wasted  —  the  men  who  might  have 
been  —  a  large  grim  Who's  Who  —  a 
book  of  silence  and  darkness,  it  would  be 
a  thicker  book  than  the  big,  red,  happy, 
complacent  one  we  know  so  well.  In- 
ventive men  are  apt  to  be  dreamers  and 
they  are  given  to  being  disinterested  and 
to  not  defending  themselves,  and  they  are 
whimsical  and  reckless,  and  if  the  at- 
mosphere in  a  factory  is  unfavorable-  to 
thinking  of  things  they  get  over  it.  The 
men  who  have  a  way  of  thinking  of 
things,  too,  are  apt  to  be  inconvenient  and 
queer.  They  come  generally  in  odd  sizes. 
They  have  edges.  The  whole  tendency 
of  the  foremen  and  the  managers  is  to  file 
the  creative  men  down,  and  practically 
throw  them  away.  The  study  of  how  not 
to  do  this  is  what  makes  a  great  factory 
a  work  of  imagination  and  an  art- form. 
223 


inspired  A  million  dollars  is  an  art- form  in  pro- 

portion to  the  number  of  men  who  have 

A  Million     been  created  and  expressed  in  it.     A  mil- 
Dollars  as  an 
Art  Form     lionaire  can  be  looked  upon  as  an  artist 

when  he  has  discovered  a  million  dollars' 
worth  of  men  and  the  things  the  men  have 
thought  of,  and  has  put  the  men  and  the 
things  upon  the  markets  of  the  world. 
We  will  all  want  him  to  be  a  millionaire  if 
he  will  do  that.  We  will  all  look  upon 
him  as  appointed  to  the  position  by  a  fair, 
free-for-all  natural  selection  if  he  has  the 
power  of  daily  making  the  men  around 
him  more  valuable  than  they  could  make 
themselves,  or  than  any  of  the  rest  of  us 
could  make  them. 

It  will  be  conceded  by  all  of  us  and  by 
all  classes  of  men  that  the  business  of 
being  a  millionaire,  the  skilled  labor  of  a 
rich  man  like  this,  is  an  art.  It  will 
almost  seem  to  us  sometimes  —  in  the 
cases  of  certain  priceless  men  that  have 
been  invented  —  like  a  religion.  And  yet 
all  the  time  that  it  is  a  religion  and  all  the 


time  that  it  is  an  art,  and  full  of  genius  Millionaires 
and  imagination,  it  will  be  seen  that  the 
most  business-like,  the  most  matter-of- 
fact,  sensible,  and  economical  occupation 
in  which  a  great  manufacturer  can  be  en- 
gaged is  the  business  of  inventing  people, 
of  human  horticulture,  the  cross-fertiliz- 
ing, in  his  great  buildings  of  machines,  of 
machines  and  men.  It  does  not  follow 
that  every  shop-room,  as  one  goes  through 
should  seem  to  be  filled  with  sprouting 
geniuses, —  but  one  would  expect  in  every 
shop-room  the  atmosphere,  the  climate  of 
experiment,  and  over  in  one  corner  at 
least  there  ought  to  be  a  cucumber- frame 
for  ideas.  Every  shop-room  and  the 
whole  factory  as  one  goes  by  and  looks  up 
at  the  rows  of  the  shining  windows  should 
be  looked  upon  as  a  nursery  of  inventions, 
a  great  hothouse  of  brains. 

If  this  becomes  true  —  if  it  becomes 
true  in  one  single  case — there  will  be  no 
one  to  say  then  that  making  a  million  dol- 
lars with  machines  and  men  is  not  an  art- 


inspired       form,  and  that  a  great  work  of  the  imagi- 

Millionaires          , .  ,  ,     ,  ,  . 

nation  has  not  been  wrought  upon  the 
A  Million     world.      A  fortune  carefully  and  nobly 

Dollars  as  an  J 

Art  Form  wrought  in  this  way  will  be  looked  upon 
like  a  great  work  of  art,  like  Wagner's 
Parsifal,  Raphael's  Madonna,  Beetho- 
ven's Ninth  Symphony,  Millet's  Glean- 
ers, Marconi's  Telegraph,  and  Cologne 
Cathedral,  as  an  act  of  communion,  a 
great,  mutual,  self -revelation  between  a 
man  and  a  world. 

Some  one  is  going  to  loom  up  in 
America  and  do  a  factory  yet  that  will 
rank  with  Shakespeare's  Hamlet,  Homer's 
Iliad,  and  the  Sixtieth  Chapter  of  Isaiah. 
Some  man  who  is  creative  with  money,  a 
Leonardo  da  Vinci  with  dollars,  will  yet 
prove  that  a  business  man  can  be  as  good 
as  an  artist,  that,  like  the  artist,  he  can 
sketch  in  the  colors  of  a  new  world  around 
us — if  he  wants  to,  and  do  some  great  mas- 
terpiece of  expectation  upon  the  human 
heart.  He  will  prove  that  the  inspired 
and  noble  conceptions  of  a  man  are  quite 
226 


as  entitled  to  glory  and  to  immortality  in  Millionaires 

the  world,  and  are  quite  as  artistic  when  peo°lenv 

done  in  dollars  as  they  are  when  they  are 

done  in  tube-paints,  lace-needles,  chisels, 

wind  in  a  pipe,  or  catgut,  or  words  out  of 

a  dictionary.     The  factory  that  this  man 

will  do  will  touch  us  like  a  religion  or  a 

great  work  of  art.     It  will  not  need  to 

have  great  columns  in  front  of  it  to  seem 

beautiful  to  us,  and  it  will  not  need  to  have 

Gothic  windows  to  seem  like  a  church,  and 

it  will  be  filled  all  day  long,  as  we  go  by, 

with  the  whirl  of  the  wheels  in  it,  and  the 

whirl  of  the  wheels  shall  be  as  the  chant  of 

a  great  people. 

I  have  seen  their  hope  and  their  strug- 
gle. I  have  seen  that  the  picture  of  this 
factory  when  it  comes  —  this  first  master- 
piece by  a  millionaire  —  will  be  put  forth 
as  the  chart  or  as  the  ground-plan  of  the 
future.  It  shall  be  looked  upon  as  the 
challenge  of  civilization.  It  shall  be 
tacked  by  a  Martin  Luther  on  the  door  of 
the  world. 


227 


VII 

How  Some  Money  Looks 

is  reason  to  believe  that  this 


J^  is  coming  to  pass,  the  millionaire  to 
whom  a  million  dollars  is  an  art  form, 
because  the  typical  American  millionaire 
is  no  longer  satisfied  with  plain,  ordinary, 
humdrum  covetousness.  The  more  obvi- 
ous rich  man,  the  kind  anybody  could  be  if 
he  tried,  feels  ill  at  ease  in  America  to-day. 
He  does  not  need  to  be  driven  to  doing  bet- 
ter. He  wants  to  and  he  is  trying  to  see 
how  he  can.  He  sees  that  there  is  some- 
thing about  plain,  humdrum  covetousness 
which,  no  matter  how  it  refines  and  adorns 
itself  in  a  man's  life,  keeps  him  uncom- 
fortable about  himself.  What  is  the  pos- 
sible object  of  having  great  wealth  when 
all  that  one  can  think  of  for  it,  is  that  it  is 
a  device  for  being  dissatisfied  in  very  large 
figures  instead  of  very  small  ones  ?  There 
228 


is  always  something  more  some  other  man  HOW  Some 
can  get.  How  is  the  rich  man  any  better 
than  the  most  dependent  poor  man  if  he 
is  dependent  to  the  last  upon  a  mere  rudi- 
mentary stilted  love  of  having  things  and 
having  to  handle  and  own  them  in  order  to 
love  them  ?  He  looks  about  the  world 
and  he  sees  all  the  other  millionaires  so 
monotonous  and  cheap  and  uninteresting 

—  these  great  mobs  of  them,  all  alike,  say- 
ing the  same  great  platitudes  with  money 

—  of  houses  and  lands.     He  is  merely  one 
more,  and  he  finds  it  is  not  as  interesting 
or  as  filling  —  being  a  millionaire  —  as 
one  would  have  thought.       This  is  the 
first  reason  why  the  typical  American 
millionaire,  the  one  with  the  mere,  hum- 
drum covetousness,  is  going  to  be  nearer 
to  what  he  ought  to  be.       He  is  seeing 
through  himself. 

The  second  reason  for  being  hopeful 
about  him  is  that  if  the  every-day,  hum- 
drum millionaire  does  not  do  his  own  see- 
ing-through  for  himself,  there  are  people 


inspired       in  this  country  who  are  going  to  see  that 

Millionaires  i      ••        ,          •  •    n       t  • 

somebody  does  it  for  him. 

Taking  them  as  a  class,  it  is  to  be  ad- 
mitted that  mere  millionaires,  while  they 
may  be  heady  and  much  given  to  their 
own  way  at  times,  in  the  long  run  are  like 
other  human  beings  and  care  what  people 
think.  Before  they  die  they  notice  peo- 
ple. It  is  but  natural  and  human  that 
having  slaved  away  and  given  up  so  many 
things  for  a  million  dollars,  a  man  should 
want  a  million  dollars  to  be  becoming  to 
him.  He  wants  people  to  feel  that  he  is 
better  off  than  he  was  before.  If  there 
were  any  way  in  which,  after  he  has  swept 
in  his  million  dollars,  he  could  go  about 
and  pay  people  so  much  apiece  for  believ- 
ing that  he  liked  it,  he  would  spend  it,  or 
nearly  all  of  it,  sometimes,  on  people's 
thoughts.  The  moment  a  man  discovers 
that  his  money  in  our  modern  society  is 
displaying  him  to  disadvantage,  or  is  ex- 
posing him  to  social  ostracism,  or  to  the  ill- 
will  of  his  f  ellowmen,  he  is  bound  to  con- 


duct  his  fortune  differently.    This  is  a  pro-  HOW  Some 

,1      i     •  •  t  n    Money  Looks 

cess  that  is  going  on  about  us  now  all 
through  the  United  States.  It  is  the  next 
cloud  the  size  of  a  man's  hand.  The  mere 
millionaire  is  thinking  how  he  looks.  He 
falls  to  comparing  himself  with  the  other 
millionaires.  He  finds  that  many  of  them 
have  more  prestige  than  he,  that  people 
seem  to  be  interested  in  some  millionaires 
for  themselves.  They  seem  to  be  the  men 
who  have  not  lost  track  of  the  human  qual- 
ities in  their  money  —  its  visions,  its  dar- 
ing and  self-control,  its  chivalry,  its  big, 
earlier,  joyous,  wise  faiths,  its  wagers  and 
risks,  its  spirit  of  prophecy  and  adventure, 
and  when  all  these  things,  the  things 
that  the  money  is  really  for,  are 
gone  out  of  it  and  the  man  is  left,  at  last, 
a  great,  still,  helpless  mummy  of  riches, 
he  finds  that  a  mere  millionaire  is  a  nobody 
and  that  everybody  is  bored  by  him.  Ex- 
cept with  his  check-book  in  his  hand  who 
cares  to  speak  to  him? 

And  even  his  money  is  not  really  inter- 


inspired       esting.     Not  a  single  faith  or  belief  in  it, 

Millionaires  ..  '      .  .       .    J 

sometimes.  The  one  single  interesting 
thing  he  can  think  of  about  his  money, 
when  he  sits  down  to  think  it  over,  is  that 
there  is  sure  to  be  more  of  it.  And  that 
does  not  interest  a  really  intelligent  man 
more  than  a  minute.  The  subject  is  ex- 
hausted. He  falls  to  thinking  of  ways  of 
being  agreeable  and  of  having  things  to 
talk  about  with  other  men.  He  wonders 
vaguely  about  many  of  the  men  he  sees 
about  him,  some  of  them  rich  and  some 
of  them  poor,  that  people  seem  to  regard 
highly,  men  it  is  some  object  to  know 
and  to  be  seen  with  in  the  world,  the  men 
who  are  giving  great  lifts  on  it,  who  are 
really  doing  things,  and  suddenly  it  is  as 
if  he  fell  over  a  great  precipice  in  himself. 
He  finds  he  is  wondering  where  he  is,  and 
who  he  was  and  who  he  thought  he  was, 
when  he  is  thrown  with  such  men.  There 
seems  to  be  nothing  he  can  do  with  a  man 
who  belongs  in  this  class  that  will  interest 
him.  All  he  can  do  with  such  a  man,  when 
231 


he  does  not  notice  him  enough,  is  to  step  HOW  Some 
up  to  him  and  say:  "  Did  you  know  I  was 
worth  forty  million  dollars?  Like  some?  " 
But  even  after  he  has  said  that,  while  the 
man  would  be  polite,  of  course,  he  would 
see  he  did  not  exactly  notice  him.  The 
more  prominent  he  grows  in  the  world  the 
more  complicated  a  thing  it  seems,  to  be 
somebody  in  particular.  No  one  takes 
him  quite  seriously,  he  finds,  even  when 
he  gets  into  the  United  States  Senate.  If 
what  a  millionaire  really  has  is  nonentity, 
all  that  he  can  ever  do  with  great  wealth  is 
to  put  his  nonentity  where  more  people 
will  see  it.  Nobody  pretends  to  deny  that 
a  millionaire,  by  just  being  a  millionaire, 
is  important  in  a  way.  People  give  mere 
millionaires  as  a  class,  or  in  the  bulk,  a  cer- 
tain recognition,  but  they  are  not  interest- 
ing. People  try  to  be  interested  in  them, 
but  somehow  money  that  is  only  interested 
in  itself  does  not  make  an  interesting  man. 
Among  the  real  men,  who  are  making  the 
real  world,  and  that  the  real  world  knows 


inspired  and  loves,  the  common  humdrum  million- 
8  aire  finds  that  he  is  an  outsider  as  a  matter 
of  course.  If  one  has  become  a  million- 
aire in  the  quick,  unbelieving,  or  ordinary, 
"  business  is  business "  way,  one  finds 
one's  self  shut  out  forever  from  the  great 
and  from  the  worth  while  —  has  only  the 
most  ordinary  people  to  associate 
with,  or  rows  of  college  presidents  ring- 
ing one's  door  bell.  But  that  is  not  Soci- 
ety. And  even  the  college  presidents  are 
restless.  Many  of  them  do  not  call  on 
him.  Some  of  them,  the  bigger  ones, 
seem  to  be  almost  afraid  sometimes  he  will 
call  on  them,  or  that  he  will  shove  off 
money  on  them,  publicly,  perhaps,  or  in 
some  way  that  a  dignified,  scholarly 
institution  would  not  like.  Even  more 
common  people,  he  finds,  not  only  do  not 
pay  any  attention  to  him  and  do  not  want 
him  for  himself,  but  they  do  not  want 
his  money,  without  looking  it  over  care- 
fully and  snubbing  him  in  public  and  ex- 
amining him  —  before  they  will  let  him 
help  them  convert  the  heathen  with  it. 


It  does  not  follow  that  this  picture  of  HOW  Some 

,  . !  i  i  •!      Money  Looks 

how  the  common,  covetous,  humdrum  mil- 
lionaire is  made  to  feel  is  overdrawn,  be- 
cause the  world  keeps  on  year  after 
year  still  being  full  of  humdrum 
millionaires  who  do  not  want  to 
hide.  It  is  admitted  that  the  humdrum 
millionaires  do  not  want  to  hide  at  first. 
They  spend  their  first  few  years  in  learning 
to.  Hundreds  of  them  can  be  seen  elbow- 
ing about  every  day  and  night  in  every 
center  of  the  world.  There  is  not  a  man 
anywhere  of  any  real  personal  impor- 
tance or  distinction  in  the  real  world  to- 
day, but  has  these  fresh  arrivals,  these  im- 
migrants of  money  all  about  him,  fawn- 
ing upon  him,  every  one  of  them  blind 
and  clumsy  with  money,  and  out  of 
the  spirit  of  the  times  with  money,  and  out 
of  date  with  it,  hoping  up  vaguely  and 
dumbly  out  of  his  poor,  funny,  selfish, 
old-fashioned,  little  dust-heap,  toward  the 
men  and  toward  the  wealth  that  the  world 
thinks  worth  while. 


inspired  It  is  merely  a  matter  of  a  few  years 

Millionaires  •  ..  j    •!  •IT 

experimenting,  and  the  mere  millionaire 
sees  these  things  that  the  people  about  him 
see.  The  only  pleasure  he  has  left  some- 
times is  not  to  let  them  know  it,  and  he  nat- 
urally makes  all  the  arrangements  he  can 
think  of  for  looking  happy,  and  for  not 
seeming  to  need  things.  But  at  bottom,  or 
when  nobody  is  looking,  our  millionaires 
grow  simple.  If  millionaires  were  free, 
or  if  their  spirits  were  free,  and  had  a  way 
of  wandering  around  nights,  and  none  of 
us  were  supposed  to  know,  one  could  see 
scores  of  them  —  of  our  biggest  million- 
aires, almost  any  fine  moonlight  night 
now,  running  like  boys  again,  and  all  of 
them  to  a  man,  making  a  bee-line  for 
Diogenes  in  his  Tub. 

Under  the  circumstances,  and  with 
men  like  these,  it  does  not  seem  best  to 
scold  or  to  worry,  or  to  force  millionaires, 
or  to  try  to  get  millionaires  to  be  saints. 
They  are  hideous,  many  of  them,  and  live 
in  hideous  houses,  and  are  unpleasing  and 


uninteresting  to  be  with,  perhaps,  and  HOW  Some 
they  are  down  in  the  slums  in  their  hearts ; 
but  the  way  to  do  with  them  is  not  to  be 
superior  to  them  and  keep  from  associat- 
ing with  them,  but  to  try  to  give  them  a 
sense  of  opportunity  and  to  make  them 
self-respecting.  The  way  to  do  is  to  go 
down  quietly  and  start  settlements  among 
them  of  people  who  are  happy. 

There  are  many  things  to  make  us  hope- 
ful about  even  our  worst  cases  of  mere  . 
millionaires.  Being  a  mere  millionaire  is 
a  self -limiting  disease.  The  millionaire 
of  the  plain,  piling-up  sort,  is  making 
comparisons.  He  is  beginning  to  take 
his  wealth  seriously.  He  wants  it  to  say 
pleasant  things  about  him.  He  is  being 
slowly  driven  into  taking  a  million  dollars 
as  an  art-form  because  he  is  seeing 
through  himself. 


VIII 

How  the  People  Show  Through 

SOCIETY  is  not  dependent  for  its 
hopefulness  on  having  its  million- 
aires see  through  themselves  or  upon  their 
taking  money  as  a  pleasant  art-form  of 
their  own  accord.  Every  man's  money 
reveals  the  man  in  it,  and  in  the  sense  of 
being  a  self-expression  has  the  effect  of 
a  work  of  art.  One  can  look  up  at  almost 
any  million  dollars  one  knows  in  the 
world  to-day,  as  one  goes  by,  as  "  A  Por- 
trait of  the  Artist  by  Himself."  What- 
ever it  is  a  man  has  in  him,  if  he  has  a  mil- 
lion dollars,  everybody  finds  out.  It  is 
getting  to  be  like  a  challenge,  a  kind  of 
threat,  to  all  the  rich  men  in  our  modern 
life  —  the  frankness,  the  awful  naivete  of 
a  great  fortune. 

Dollars  are  more  eloquent  than  words 
because  people  notice  them  more.     Every 
238 


detail  that  is  associated  with  a  dollar  in  HOW  the 
America  is  vivid  and  memorable.  To  the 
people  who  get  it  and  to  the  people  who 
try  to  get  it,  and  all  along  the  line,  every 
dollar  in  the  modern  world  is  read  through 
and  through  and  over  and  over  again,  as  in 
the  days  of  old  a  poem  used  to 
be.  Dollars  are  short  poems  by  every-day 
people.  We  do  not  miss  any  of  the  turns 
or  shadings  in  a  dollar.  A  man  could 
talk  to  us,  most  of  us,  until  doomsday  to 
get  acquainted,  but  if  he  puts  his  hand 
into  our  pockets  we  know  what  he  is  like. 
The  last  thing  a  man  can  do  with  a  mil- 
lion dollars  is  to  keep  people  from  know- 
ing him  with  it.  With  five  thousand  dol- 
lars people  will  know  him  five  thousand 
dollars'  worth,  and  with  a  million  dollars 
they  will  know  him  a  million  dollars' 
worth.  Hetty  Green  and  Helen  Gould, 
Robert  Ogden,  Morris  K.  Jessup,  and 
Russell  Sage  do  not  need  to  be  painted 
by  John  Sargent.  Every  man  who 
knows  about  their  money  and  about  his 
239 


inspired       own  money  carries  around  their  portraits 

Millionaires  1  .  ,  TTT,  .       ,, 

in  his  pocket.  Where  is  the  man  who 
does  not  know  Russell  Sage,  and  who  has 
not  been  discouraged  about  the  world 
with  him,  and  who  has  not  carried  for 
years  a  good  portrait  of  him,  a  kind  of 
miniature  hanging  like  a  little  millstone 
about  his  neck?  We  love  and  hate  and 
are  seers  and  poets  toward  the  men  who 
have  what  we  want.  It  is  another  of  the 
clouds  of  the  size  of  a  man's  hand,  the 
transparency  of  money  in  the  modern 
world.  It  is  what  makes  us  hopeful  about 
our  millionaires.  A  whole  planet,  now 
that  it  is  all  opened  up  and  made  into  one 
big  living-room,  is  not  going  to  be  trifled 
with.  It  is  sure  to  do  as  it  likes  sooner 
or  later,  make  the  millionaire  the  kind  of 
millionaire  it  wants,  because  it  is  always 
sure  sooner  or  later  to  put  him  in  an  ex- 
posed place.  The  planet  is  all  lighted  by 
electricity  now.  Phonographs  are  hang- 
ing in  the  woods.  A  millionaire  cannot 
even  whisper  on  it  —  and  he  can  only  hide 
240 


for  a  minute.  There  is  nothing  Harri-  HOW  the 
man  can  do,  except  for  a  very  little  while, 
to  keep  his  money  from  telling  the  truth 
about  him,  from  confiding  to  everybody 
what  kind  of  a  man  he  is.  And  it  is  be- 
cause his  money  is  really  telling  the  truth 
about  him  at  last,  in  this  great  world- 
action  that  is  taking  place,  that  it  is  going 
to  inspire  the  millionaire.  At  all  events  it 
comes  to  me  of  late,  like  a  sudden  piece 
of  good  news,  that  under  our  new  and 
special  modern  conditions  it  is  really  true 
that  a  man  who  is  clever  enough  to  be  a 
millionaire,  does  not  need  to  be  wasted  if 
he  keeps  on  being  clever,  and  thinking. 
His  money  builds  itself  like  a  great  show- 
window  around  him  and  puts  him  in  the 
middle  of  it.  The  vision  of  the  world 
flows  past  him  and  over  him.  There  is 
getting  to  be  nothing  he  can  really  do 
under  the  circumstances  but  to  arrange 
himself  to  be  seen  through  —  his  soul  and 
his  money  together  —  as  long  as  he  lives 
and  long  after  he  is  dead.  Perhaps  some 


inspired       millionaires  would  rather  die  first  than 

Millionaires 

be  men  with  their  money  —  the  men  the 
people  are  demanding  and  expecting  — 
but  I  believe  that  the  men  who  are  watch- 
ing them,  the  men  who  are  going  to  take 
their  places,  will  begin  differently.  They 
will  begin  by  being  men  with  their  money 
from  the  start,  in  the  very  making  of  it. 
They  will  want  their  money  to  be  re- 
spected and  loved  —  to  be  human  all 
through. 

It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  it  can  be  dis- 
missed as  poetry,  or  idealism,  to  believe 
this.  It  is  mere  force  of  circumstances 
that  is  going  to  produce  reformed  million- 
aires, a  mere  matter  of  seeing  through 
the  millionaires  we  already  have.  And 
the  more  they  are  seen  through,  the  more 
they  will  improve.  They  will  want  to  en- 
joy being  seen  through.  The  millionaire 
has  the  confirmed  habit  of  getting  what 
he  wants.  Being  seen  through  —  per- 
haps even  being  loved  —  is  going  to  be 
what  he  wants  next.  He  has  had  nearly 


all  the  other  things.     In  the  meantime,  HOW  the 
whether  he  wants  it  or  not,  the  world  is 
filled  with  the  vision.     It  is  peremptory. 
The    Twentieth    Century   has    given   its 
order  to  rich  men  and  it  will  be  obeyed. 

And  this  would  seem  to  be  coming  to 
pass,  not  by  any  special  revelation  or 
gospel  for  millionaires  but  by  what  seems 
to  be  the  elemental,  almost  mechanical 
action  of  money  upon  the  modern  mind. 
There  is  not  a  man  living,  or  who  is  going 
about  his  work  to-day,  whose  mind  is  not 
being  pried  open  by  money.  These  great 
fortunes,  like  vast  searchlights  probing 
through  the  uttermost  recesses  of  human 
life,  are  making  things  terrifically  plain. 
The  trusts  themselves,  like  great  gigantic 
stupid  prophets  stalking  the  earth,  are 
stamping  the  Bible  down  into  the  souls  of 
men.  They  are  not  meaning  to  do  it, 
but  they  are.  We  men  of  to-day,  who  are 
living  with  these  vast  fortunes  fighting 
out  the  fate  of  the  world  above  our  heads, 
are  slowly  coming  to  see  that  every  time 
243 


inspired       a  million  dollars  touches  a  spiritual  or 

Millionaires  it   into   the 


very  fiber  of  the  lives  of  men  with  its  heels, 
or  it  flames  up  hope  with  some  strange, 
beautiful  light  upon  the  windows  of  fac- 
tories and  upon  the  hearts  of  cities. 

We  are  all  going  to  believe  in  money 
soon.  We  are  going  to  have  men  that 
will  make  us  believe  in  it.  It  will  be  a 
platitude.  People  will  believe  in  money 
as  they  believe  in  telescopes  or  in  X  Rays, 
because  it  is  all  light.  It  shows  up  every 
one.  And  probably  the  only  way  to  make 
the  habit  of  having  men  in  this  planet  a 
safe  habit  is  to  keep  them  exposed. 

It  is  going  to  be  one  of  the  special  con- 
tributions of  the  twentieth  century  to  the 
great  faiths  of  the  world  that  it  will 
make  money  a  part  of  its  creed.  It  will 
believe  that  capital  is  not  a  meaningless  or 
a  dead  thing.  It  will  see  that  capital  is  an 
art-form,  a  medium  of  human  expression, 
as  base  or  noble,  or  as  destructive  or  cre- 
ative, as  cowardly  or  believing,  as  the  men 
244 


who  stand  behind  it.  It  is  going  to  be  in-  HOW  the 
spired  with  wealth  —  and  as  strong  men  show 
are  inspired  with  strength.  It  will  lift  it 
up  and  make  it  again  splendid  on  the 
earth.  The  twentieth-century  man  will  see 
that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  unmoral 
money,  that  all  capital  is  either  good  or 
bad  capital.  If  a  man  is  a  noble  or  true 
man  and  really  has  a  vision,  or  something 
he  wants  to  fill  out,  he  will  look  upon  all 
this  money  going  eloquent  and  vivid  and 
beautiful  and  terrible  through  the  world, 
with  covetousness  for  his  vision ;  and  as  an 
artist  looks  for  words,  and  a  composer  for 
mighty  melodies,  and  a  painter  for  the 
colors  that  build  the  day,  he  will  seek  out 
the  fortune  that  shall  publish  upon  the 
mountains  and  upon  the  seas  and  upon 
the  hearts  of  men  what  he  has  seen  and 
loved. 

Even  now,  one  may  go  about  every- 
where   sight-seeing    in    money  —  seeing 
men  loomed  up  in  it.     It  is  so  transparent 
everywhere,    this    modern    money  —  its 
245 


inspired  crowds  of  souls  in  it  showing  through,  its 
faces,  its  streets  of  men  saving  themselves 
and  being  freed  and  expressed  in  it,  and 
the  souls  that  are  being  damned  in  it. 
Day  after  day  I  seem  to  see  the  streets,  as 
I  go  by  or  as  I  look  down  upon  them, 
flowing  with  gold.  Everywhere  these 
same  human  souls  struggling  up  through 
it  singing  —  and  the  dead  and  muffled 
faces  sweeping  past.  Not  a  minute  that 
money  bears  interest,  or  sings  its  way  up 
into  a  human  life,  or  bleeds  out  of  a  man, 
but  it  is  terrible  or  beautiful  money.  Any 
one  can  look  up  in  these  days  —  see  these 
huge  fortunes  —  automobiles  lunging 
along  like  splendid  hells,  their  owners  in 
them  and  the  souls  they  have  caught  be- 
side them,  all  being  bowled  to  death  to- 
gether. It  does  not  take  a  man  of  genius 
to  keep  from  envying  money,  now, — 
sealed  up  in  its  own  dullness  and  helpless- 
ness. It  is  getting  to  be  the  common 
revelation  of  the  world,  that  a  man's 
money  cannot  be  good  unless  he  is.  If  in 


getting  his  money  a  man  has  let  it  separate  HOW  the 
him  from  his  own  soul,  the  money  merely  Show  Through 
goes  on  after  him,  wild  and  blind  and 
cruel,  separating  every  other  man  from 
his  soul,  that  it  touches. 

What    could    be    more    pathetic,    for 

instance,  than  Mr. as  an  educator  — 

a  man  who  is  educating-and-mowing- 
down  two  hundred  thousand  (?)  men  a 
day,  ten  hours  a  day,  for  forty  years  of 
their  lives;  that  is,  who  is  separating  the 
souls  of  his  employees  from  .their  work, 
bullying  them  into  being  linked  with  a 
work  and  a  method  they  despise,  and  who 
is  trying  to  atone  for  it  all  —  this  vast 
terrible  schooling,  ten  hours  a  day,  forty 
years,  two  hundred  thousand  men's  lives 
—  by  piecing  together  professors  and  dol- 
lars, putting  up  a  little  playhouse  of 
learning,  before  the  world,  to  give  a  few 
fresh  young  boys  and  girls  four  years 
with  paper  books?  —  a  man  the  very 
thought  of  whom  has  ruined  more  men 
and  devastated  more  faiths  and  created 
247 


inspired  more  cowards  and  brutes  and  fools  in  all 
8  walks  of  life  than  any  other  influence  in 
the  nineteenth  century,  and  who  is  trying 
to  eke  out  at  last  a  spoonful  of  atonement 
for  it  all, —  all  this  vast  baptism  of  the 
business  world  in  despair  and  force  and 
cursing  and  pessimism,  by  perching  up 

before  it University,  like  a  dove  cote 

on  a  volcano. 

It  may  blur  people's  eyes  for  a  minute, 
but  everyone  really  knows  in  his  heart  — 
every  man  in  this  nation  —  that  the  only 

real  education  Mr.  has  established, 

or  ever  can  establish,  is  the  way  he  has 
made  his  money.  Everyone  knows  also 
that  the  only  possible,  the  only  real  edu- 
cation Mr. can  give  to  a  man  would 

have  to  be  through  the  daily  thing  he  gives 
the  man  to  do,  ten  hours  a  day,  through  the 
way  he  lets  him  do  it,  through  the  spirit 
and  expression  he  allows  him  to  put  into  it 

ten  hours  a  day.     Mr. 's  real  school, 

the  one  with  two  hundred  thousand  men 
in  it,  and  eighty  million  helpless  spec- 


tators  in  the  galleries,  is  a  school  which  HOW  the 
is  working  out  a  daily,  bitter,  lying  curse  show  Through 
upon  the  rich,  and  a  bitter,  lying  curse 
upon  the  poor,  which  it  is  going  to  take 
the  world  generations  to  redeem. 

I  cannot  but  believe  that  when 
the  millionaire  begins  to  see  capital 
as  it  really  is,  the  first  moment  he 
looks  upon  his  own  money  clearly, 
sees  how  exposed  he  is  in  it,  the 
whole  curious  world  Out  There  looking 
right  down  through  it,  into  the  bottom  of 
his  soul,  it  will  make  a  difference.  Slowly 
he  will  be  filled  with  terror  if  his  money 
is  not  becoming  to  him,  and  shame  will  be 
heaped  upon  him.  If  his  money  is  in  the 
act  of  being  dull  and  brutal  in  the  world, 
if  it  is  daily  being  used  in  bribing  men,  in 
driving  them  to  put  their  souls  in  one  place 
and  their  work  in  another,  it  will  begin  to 
tell  upon  him.  He  will  feel  himself  being 
startled  into  a  vision,  into  making  his 
money  say  pleasant  things  about  himself. 

He  will  begin  with  pleasant  nothings 
at    first,    perhaps.     He    will    make    his 
249 


inspired       money  say  the  same  things  about  him  that 

Millionaires    ..    ,  •  i      i  ^N        i       -11 

it  has  said  about  everyone.  Gradually 
he  will  grow  weary  of  this,  and  will  begin 
to  suspect,  besides,  that  the  things  that 
almost  anybody  would  say  with  money 
cannot  be  the  most  necessary  things.  The 
mere  building  of  slum  settlements,  col- 
leges, museums,  and  parks,  and  the  tossing 
out  of  other  knicknacks  (like  libraries)  at 
this  great  appalling  American  public  of 
ours  —  and  all  the  other  immemorial  con- 
ventionalities and  court-plasters  of  wealth 
with  which  it  tries  to  mitigate  the  evil  it  has 
produced  —  will  not  last  him  long.  He 
will  want  to  be  thorough.  And  he  will  see 
how  he  looks.  When  a  man  has  spent  all 
his  life  and  all  his  money  in  bribing  and 
bullying  labor,  in  heaping  up  machines  on 
the  souls  of  men,  in  making  a  monstrous 
vacant-minded,  hollow-eyed,  weary,  list- 
less factory-city  —  giving  an  art  gallery 
to  it  just  before  one  dies  seems  a  small 
affair.  He  will  begin  to  see  (though  it 
may  be  too  late)  that  it  is  only  at  its  earn- 
150 


ing  end  that  a  man's  money  really  counts,  HOW  the 
and  the  man  that  goes  with  it.     If  money  ShowThrough 
is  not  superficial  it  must  be  spent  in  the 
market-place,  in  redeeming  labor,  hi  put- 
ting the  soul  on  a  business  basis,  in  some 
one  great  industry  of  the  world.     The 
beautiful  must  not  be  placed  around  the 
laboring  man.     It  must  be  placed  in  his 
heart  and  made  free  there,  and  allowed 
to  work  out  in  his  hands. 


IX 

The  Still  Revolution 

THE  pivot  of  a  man  is  his  faculty  for 
ideals.      If   you   want  to   turn   a 
world,  the  place  to  get  hold  to  turn  it,  is 
its  Soul.     Its  soul  is  what  it  worships. 

There  is  no  reason  to  think  that  the  fac- 
ulty of  worship  is  lost  to-day  or  that  it 
ever  is,  or  ever  will  be.  Every  man  de- 
mands something  to  worship,  and  what  we 
are  worshiping  in  this  present  mood  of 
the  world  is  success.  If  we  worshiped 
failure  and  martyrdom,  which  was  what 
was  worshiped  in  the  early  era  of  Chris- 
tianity, I  believe  that  martyrs  would  be  as 
common  and  cheap  in  modern  life  as  mil- 
lionaires. If  we  worshiped  military 
glory,  as  in  the  days  of  the  Crusades,  men 
would  crowd  into  wars  and  throw  their 
fortunes  into  the  glow  of  death  or  victory. 
All  that  has  happened  is  that  the  world 


has  another  ideal  and  that  the  other  ideal  The  still 
is  concrete  and  scattered  about  amongst 
us.  If  we  had  one  more  great  preacher 
as  things  are  going,  in  the  pulpit  to-day, 
one  that  would  be  half -worshipful,  great 
preachers  would  be  seen  starting  up  in 
every  quarter  of  the  land,  just  as  a  little 
while  ago  we  were  starting  everywhere 
with  young  mobs  of  Mark  Hannas.  It 
is  through  the  faiths,  the  great  humanized 
embodied  ideals  —  the  things  that  take 
hold  of  the  imaginations  of  men  —  that 
the  great  revolution  in  America  is  going 
to  be  wrought.  The  vision  of  Fifth 
Avenue,  like  a  great  artery  of  ideals,  is 
seen  coursing  like  fire  to-day  through  this 
whole  people.  Any  other  ideal,  if  a  man 
happened  to  see  it  —  the  great  procession 
of  it  —  all  embodied  and  stretching  and 
glittering  out  before  him,  making  a  kind 
of  perspective  for  his  life,  would  do  as 
well. 

Success  of  any  kind  at  any  price  is  what 
we  really  worship,  and  as  we  are  con- 
253 


inspired       vinced  just  now  that  money,  instead  of 

Millionaires   i     •  .-,  -, 

being  a  possible  accompaniment  or  acci- 
dent of  success,  is  the  way  to  get  it,  we  are 
worshiping  money.  We  are  all  ideal- 
ists. The  appeal  to  a  world's  faith  or 
worship  is  the  only  appeal  that  will  really 
work.  The  one  practical  way  to  bring 
things  to  pass  in  this  world  is  to  touch 
it  with  its  heroes,  to  lay  across  it  its  vision. 
It  does  not ,  follow  because  the  idea  that  is 
put  forward  in  these  pages  is  beautiful  — 
because  it  makes  one  want  to  worship  a 
little  —  that  it  is  not  practical.  The  qual- 
ity in  an  idea  of  drawing  people,  i.  e.,  of 
being  beautiful,  is  the  one  peremptory 
thing  in  it,  the  one  thing  in  it  that  proves 
that  nothing  can  stop  it,  or  can  keep  it 
from  coming  to  pass.  The  one  energy 
worth  reckoning  with  —  the  one  ineffable, 
unconquerable  energy  that  rules  the 
world  —  is  what  it  worships.  To  gather 
up  the  vision,  to  flash  it  across  a 
page,  and  then  to  fling  that  page  once, 
just  once,  upon  one  millionaire's  life,  to 


touch  his  dreams  to  the  quick  —  there  are  The  still 
days  when  I  have  been  writing  these  pages 
when  I  have  felt  that  this  was  the  one 
supremely  practical  thing  just  now,  that 
any  man  could  do.  I  have  looked  across 
the  world  upon  the  young  new  million- 
aires and  I  have  seen  that  the  first  real 
artist  who  shall  appear  among  them,  who 
shall  say  what  I  have  tried  to  say,  will 
create  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth. 

Sometimes  I  have  felt,  as  I  have  looked 
up  and  as  I  have  seen  the  young  million- 
aires of  this  modern  world  and  the  young 
artists  in  it  standing  together,  out  there 
across  the  future,  that  the  inspired  mil- 
lionaire would  come  first.  He  will  be  his 
own  artist.  He  will  make  his  money  ex- 
press great  desires,  and  great  discoveries, 
and  noble  experiments,  sublime  wagers, 
and  will  touch  all  the  young  manhood  of 
the  world.  A  whole  generation  of  men 
shall  be  changed  with  a  look. 


Mr.  Carnegie  as  an  Experiment  Station 
for  Millionaires 

THE  first  and  most  important  thing 
one  can  do  with  an  ideal  for  money 
is  to  see  that  it  is  properly  worked  through 
and  defined.  This  is  already  being  done 
by  a  world-movement,  or  slow  process  of 
specimen  rich  men,  by  what  might  be  called 
a  sliding  scale  of  millionaires.  We  see 
slowly  —  most  of  us  —  and  when  we  think 
we  have  a  truth  we  seem  to  need  to  have 
men  for  it — men  to  try  it  on.  No  one  ever 
thinks  of  Mr.  Carnegie  as  merely  Mr. 
Carnegie.  The  world  has  seized  him,  has 
cornered  him  in  a  huge  fortune  and  is 
now  engaged  in  carving  out  on  him  its 
ideal  or  vision  for  money.  All  of  Mr. 
Carnegie  counts,  mistakes  and  inspira- 
tions alike,  so  many  people's  minds  are 
trooping  through  him.  What  he  does  and 


does  not  do,  and  what  we  think  he  might  Mr.  Carnegie 
do,  make  good  practice  for  all  of  us.     I  ^JjgJ 
have  not  forgotten  some  practicing  I  did  for  Millionaires 
with  my  own  mind,  several  years  ago. 
I  particularly  remember  writing  a  sen- 
tence (which  I  am  afraid  I  rather  admired 
at  the  time)   about  the  callow  youth  of 
wealth.     It  was  something  like  this: 

"  Our  millionaires-in-the-rough,  mere 
Carnegies  floundering  in  money,  stum- 
bling thoughtlessly  along,  dropping  rows 
of  libraries  and  colleges  like  kernels  of 
corn  in  a  lotp  seem  to  be  getting  a  rather 
easy,  clumsy  immortality  out  of  the  mere 
scale  in  which  they  spend  their  money  in 
not  thinking  of  anything." 

But  one  cannot  keep  one's  mind  made 
up  very  long  about  Mr.  Carnegie.  One 
cannot  be  at  all  sure  that  Mr.  Carnegie  is 
not  making  his  money  think  things  out, 
and,  though  thinking  in  such  large  fig- 
ures is  necessarily  a  somewhat  unwieldy 
and  cumbersome  way  of  thinking,  it  has 
to  be  admitted  that  by  sheer  prominence 


inspired  and  sheer  representativeness,  no  possible 
device  the  modern  world  could  have,  for 
thinking  out  money,  could  excel  Car- 
negie. All  the  world  is  thinking  it  out 
with  him  and  for  him.  It  is  as  if  Mr. 
Carnegie  were  doing  his  thinking  out 
loud  —  doing  it  in  cities  and  nations.  It 
rather  encourages  one  when  one  thinks  of 
Mr.  Carnegie  in  this  way  —  as  a  whole 
population  working  at  things,  thinking 
and  butting  away  at  truth.  He  may  be 
disappointing  sometimes  as  Mr.  Carnegie. 
But  as  a  World  Process  he  does  very  well. 
The  same  is  true  of  many  of  our  other 
millionaires,  who,  looked  at  by  and  for 
themselves,  fall  so  terribly  short  of  ideals. 
I  find  myself  more  and  more  taking  our 
millionaires  as  a  kind  of  vast  informal 
conversation  of  a  world.  Mr.  Carnegie 
is  the  biographical  reasoning  out  and 
thinking  through  of  a  whole  planet  as  to 
what  on  the  whole,  when  it  really  comes  to 
the  point,  it  will  do  with  wealth ;  as  to  the 
place  and  rights  and  duties  of  matter,  in 


the   making   of  men   and   of   cities,    of  Mr.  Carnegie 
crowds  of  heroes,  on  the  earth.  ^e*°  gution 

In  this  connection  it  is  impossible  not  to  for  Millionaires 
be  grateful  to  Mr.  Carnegie  among  our 
millionaires.  He  is  at  least  interesting. 
And  he  is  doing  more  (either  in  black  or 
white)  to  define  the  ideal  than  most  of  the 
others.  One  is  inclined  to  think,  too,  that 
the  heroic  endeavor  he  is  making  not  to  die 
disgraced,  or  not  to  be  disgraced  any 
longer  than  he  can  help,  has  something 
American  and  sterling  and  characteristic 
about  it.  Of  course,  some  of  us  cannot 
help  feeling  that  while  Mr.  Carnegie's 
determination  to  get  out  of  his  difficulty 
is  original,  it  is  original  a  little  late.  It 
would  have  been  more  original  if  he  had 
never  got  into  it,  or  had  thought  of  it  in 
time  and  had  been  a  self -controlled  mil- 
lionaire. 

It  takes  a  little  of  the  glory  out  of  being 
an  original  millionaire  and  not  dying  dis- 
graced, when  one  stops  to  think  that  not 
dying  disgraced  was  after  all,  for  Mr. 


inspired  Carnegie,  a  kind  of  last  resort  of  original- 
8  ity  and  was  merely  the  best  he  could  do 
now,  or  under  the  circumstances.  One 
remembers  that  the  greater  honor  of 
money  is  at  its  earning  end  and  there  are 
many  things  in  the  relation  of  business  to 
politics,  that  it  looked  right  to  do  forty 
years  ago,  that  the  world  has  painfully 
worked  through  to  seeing  would  not  be 
right  now.  But  it  is  hardly  fair  to  judge 
what  Andrew  Carnegie  did  forty  years 
ago  by  what  he  would  do  now.  It  does 
not  follow  because  a  man  is  a  millionaire 
that  he  should  not  be  allowed  to  see  some 
things,  afterwards,  like  the  rest  of  us. 

In  a  great  crisis  of  the  world  we  all  need 
to  be  a  little  more  generous,  perhaps,  than 
is  strictly  accurate,  toward  the  men  who 
on  the  whole  have  been  trying  hard,  and 
when  I  take  Mr.  Carnegie  as  a  sort  of  ex- 
periment station  for  millionaires,  when  I 
go  over  the  list  of  most  of  the  other  mil- 
lionaires who  are  in  the  public  eye,  there 
come  moments  —  flitting  moments  at  least 
260 


—  when  Mr.  Carnegie  looks  like  an  arch-  Mr.  Carnegie 

i  i  • . .  i       i  •  f*  /  ^1  .as  an  Experi- 

angel  —  a  little  dingy,  of  course  (there  is  ment  staption 
still  the  same  Pittsburg  look),  but  the  for  Millionaires 
Scotch  shines  through.  And  even  when 
one  thinks  that  a  man's  money  must  not 
merely  go  into  his  ideals  but  must  come 
out  of  them,  one  cannot  help  feeling  that 
much  of  Mr.  Carnegie's  did.  It  was  in- 
evitable that,  coming  up  in  the  industrial 
system  in  which  life  found  him,  he  could 
not  but  have  a  wrong  ideal  or  ground 
plan  for  a  millionaire,  but  it  could  not 
have  been  all  wrong.  There  is  too  much 
Carnegie  left.  There  is  no  one  who  does 
not  feel  a  certain  personal,  eloquent  quality 
in  Mr.  Carnegie  both  in  the  making  and 
the  spending  of  his  money  —  in  distinction 
from  Mr.  Rockefeller,  for  instance. 
There  is  more  ring,  more  workmanship  to 
the  dollar,  or  love  of  the  thing  itself,  less 
politics,  or  manipulation.  His  money 
looks  more  alive  all  through,  more  based 
on  the  discovery  and  exploiting  of 
human  beings,  and  upon  insight  into  their 
261 


inspired       virtues  —  not  all  kinds  of  virtues,  per- 

Millionaires 


that  come  from  Scotland,  the  land  of  stern 
glad  mothers  and  of  strong  men. 

At  all  events  in  these  present  groping 
days,  when  most  of  us  have  all  we  can  do 
to  steer  our  ideals,  to  get  even  the  right 
aim  for  money,  we  may  all  be  grateful  to 
Andrew  Carnegie.  He  is  not  all  that  we 
want  him  to  be,  nor  all  he  wanted  to  be 
himself,  but  he  does  to  sight  by. 


262 


XI 

On  Being  Too  Big  to  Do  Wrong 

ONE  of  the  greatest  difficulties  with 
which  our  millionaires  who  would 
like  to  be  inspired  have  to  contend, 
is  that  they  have  to  conduct  business  with 
millionaires  who  do  not  seem  to  care  about 
it.  If  the  modern  business  world  could 
be  so  arranged  that  a  millionaire,  if  he 
wanted  to,  could  go  off  and  be  inspired 
alone,  there  are  not  a  few  who  would  do  it. 
But  modern  business  is  done  largely  with 
trusts,  it  is  objected,  with  millionaires  in 
the  bulk,  great,  solid,  meaningless  masses 
of  men  who  want  to  be  good  and  will  not 
let  each  other. 

It  might  seem  for  the  moment  almost  as 
if  there  were  something  a  little  simple- 
minded  and  countrified  about  asking  our 
millionaires,  one  by  one,  to  be  inspired. 
It  is  not  an  old-fashioned,  personal  busi- 


inspired       ness  world  any  longer,  people  tell  us,  in 

Millionaires       i  •   i  .       • 

which  one  can  go  up  to  a  man,  a  single, 
responsible  man,  buttonhole  him  with 
one's  idea  of  what  is  right  and  expect  him 
to  step  off  promptly  and  do  it.  Our  mil- 
lionaires are  not  free.  They  are  all 
tangled  in  with  the  system  and  with  one 
another  and  with  unscrupulous  competi- 
tors, and  cannot  do  as  they  like. 

There  are  two  replies  to  this  position. 
In  the  first  place,  the  millionaire  who  in- 
vents something  that  all  the  world  wants, 
who  saves  all  the  men  on  the  planet  several 
dollars  a  year  and  who  takes  it  for  granted 
the  men  are  willing  to  go  halves  with  him 
and  who,  therefore,  keeps  the  mo- 
nopoly of  his  invention,  can  run 
his  factory  or  chain  of  factories 
as  he  thinks  best,  and  can  be  as  free 
as  anybody,  almost  as  free  as  a  poor  man 
or  a  man  who  is  not  in  business  at  all,  if 
he  likes.  This  kind  of  millionaire,  who 
gains  his  freedom  and  the  freedom  of 
others  by  invention  or  by  a  world-service 


is,  of  course,  the  most  natural  way  out  for  On  Being 
a  world  that  is  trying  to  be  hopeful  about  to°^o 
wealth.     He  is  the  man  this  book  is  about, 
and  that  we  must  look  to  first  for  the  gen- 
uine and  fair  sample  of  the  inspired  mil- 
lionaire. 

But  in  the  second  place,  we  are  not  lim- 
ited to  free  millionaires.  While  it  is  true 
that  all  the  myriads  of  millionaires  who 
are  helplessly  tangled  up  in  one  another 
in  one  vast  ganglion  of  money  ruling  the 
world,  cannot  be  expected  to  be  as  inspired 
as  the  free  millionaire,  and  while  it  is  true 
that  most  of  our  millionaires  cannot  select 
the  men  they  will  be  with,  and  cannot  say 
whom  they  shall  employ  or  who  shall  em- 
ploy them,  and  cannot  say  what  they  shall 
do,  or  even  what  their  money  shall  do,  and 
therefore  cannot  be  held  responsible,  one 
by  one,  like  free  millionaires  or  like  poor 
people,  they  are  going  to  be  held  responsi- 
ble all  together  by  the  world  around  them, 
and  they  are  going  to  be  inspired  all  to- 
gether in  a  slow  and  embarrassed  way  as 


inspired       fast  as  they  find  it  pays.     It  is  merely  a 

Millionaires  «  . .  /?     T         -^  m 

matter  01  time, —  finding  it  pays.  Trusts 
have  only  just  been  thought  of,  and  not 
unnaturally,  for  the  first  few  years,  being 
enormous  and  anonymous  and  unformed, 
they  have  had  an  idea  that  they  are  too 
big  to  do  right.  The  next  idea  they  are 
going  to  have  is  that  they  are  too  big  to 
do  wrong.  They  will  try  to  do  wrong, 
but  they  will  want  to  make  money  — 
great,  innocent,  vague,  pulpy  things  — 
and  they  will  find  that  they  cannot  do  it 
more  than  a  few  years,  without  spinal  col- 
umns and  without  morals  and  without  see- 
ing and  feeling  a  world.  In  the  long  run, 
the  very  bigness  of  the  trusts  instead  of 
keeping  them  from  being  inspired  is  the 
one  thing  of  all  others  that  is  going  to 
hand  them  over  helplessly  into  the  hands 
of  inspired  men.  There  are  not  going  to 
be  very  many  more  trusts  that  will  be  as 
stupid  and  as  unsuccessful  and  short- 
lived as  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  an 
institution  founded  upon  a  great,  natural 
266 


resource,  and  which  instead  of  being  a  On  Being 
failure  and  running  its  course  in  a  single  ^DO  Wrong 
generation  should  have  been  the  establish- 
ing of  a  business  house  that  should  have 
lasted  for  hundreds  of  years  and  should 
have  been  one  of  the  great  dignities,  one 
of  the  monuments  of  America  in  the  eyes 
of  the  world.  If  it  had  had  inspired  men, 
men  who  saw  a  whole  world,  men  who 
saw  the  times  and  the  nations  and  the 
newspapers  and  the  governments  and  the 
peoples,  it  would  not  have  been  so  inef- 
ficient as  an  organization,  so  incapable  as 
a  mere  machine,  as  in  a  comparatively  few 
years  to  get  into  a  head-on  collision  with 
a  nation,  put  itself  where  it  has  no  stand- 
ing or  credit  or  liberty,  and  is  not  allowed 
to  conduct  its  own  business  in  its  own  way. 
The  real  reason  the  managers  of  the 
Standard  Oil  Company  have  been  at- 
tacked by  the  people  is  not  that  they  have 
been  wicked,  but  that  they  have  been  in- 
competent and  have  not  been  big  enough 
to  conduct  their  business.  The  modern 


inspired  business  world  is  getting  too  big  for  small 
men  with  small  morals  to  see  through  it  or 
to  see  around  it  or  to  do  permanent  things 
in  it.  Nearly  all  of  the  trusts  are  learning 
that  they  are  up  against  the  whole  world 
in  business  and  that  they  will  have  to  get 
great  men,  men  who  know  a  whole  world 
and  who  see  it  and  live  in  it  —  to  conduct 
their  business.  The  things  the  modern  men 
are  trying  to  do  are  too  big  and  too  perma- 
nent not  to  be  moral.  It  is  merely  a  mat- 
ter of  a  few  more  experiments  and  every- 
body will  believe  it.  A  big  house  has  to  be 
permanent,  and  if  it  is  to  be  permanent  it 
must  have  a  great  deal  of  capital  and  if  it 
is  to  have  a  great  deal  of  capital  it  must 
make  people  believe  in  it  —  and  believe  in 
it  a  hundred  years  ahead,  and  it  is  not  prac- 
tical for  such  a  business  house  not  to  be 
good.  The  more  successful  and  prominent 
business  men  propose  to  be,  the  more  they 
are  driven  into  doing  right.  If  they  are 
big  enough  men  to  make  their  business 
everybody's  business,  everybody  is  going 
268 


to  watch  it.  Instead  of  having  firms,  as  we  On  Being 
have  for  some  time,  that  are  too  big  to  J^DO  Wron 
have  to  do  right,  we  are  going  to  have 
firms  very  soon  that  will  be  so  big  that  the 
right  will  be  the  only  practical  course  left 
open  to  them.  This  is  what  we  are  com- 
ing to.  We  are  this  very  day,  with  our 
boundless  railroads,  our  mighty  canals, 
and  our  steamers  like  great  cities  swing- 
ing across  the  sea,  watching  the  birth 
of  a  new  ethics.  The  whole  modern 
business  world  with  its  immense  com- 
binations is  full  of  hope.  We  are  all 
beginning  to  guess  it.  The  very  news- 
papers are  full  of  it.  If  you  are  very  big, 
it  is  really  not  quite  bright  to  be  wicked. 
If  you  are  little  or  short-lived,  it  might 
not  matter  or  seem  to  matter  so  much  — 
that  is,  less  will  be  done  to  you.  You  will 
not  be  picked  out  and  punished.  We  are 
going  to  have  our  big  men  good  first,  in 
the  modern  business  world,  and  those  who 
would  like  to  be  big.  Then  after  that, 
when  the  big  men  have  been  made  good, — 
269 


inspired       been  fairly  crowded  over  to  it,  the  little 

Millionaires  .,,  ,  i     -i  ,  mi  •  i 

ones  will  be  attended  to.  This  perhaps  is 
the  main  experience  one  gets  out  of  tak- 
ing up  a  morning  paper  and  reading 
from  day  to  day  the  news  about  the  trusts 
— the  sense  of  this  sublime  solar  march  or 
force  of  gravity  in  morals,  swinging  us 
on  into  righteousness,  into  a  kind  of  inevit- 
able matter  of  fact  hope.  Some  one  will 
write  a  book  very  soon,  and  he  will  relate 
the  bare  facts,  sum  up  ten  years  of  news- 
columns,  and  tell  the  trusts  to  be  good. 
And  there  will  not  be  any  cant  or  religi- 
osity or  benevolence  in  the  book.  It  will 
be  pure  business,  business  at  white  heat, 
or  raised  to  the  nth  power,  and  all 
the  while  it  will  be  such  nice  worldly  read- 
ing and  make  one  feel  precisely  as  if  one 
had  been  at  church!  All  that  there  would 
have  to  be  in  such  a  book  would  be  some 
real  religion  underneath  and  some  real 
facts  on  top  (statistics  almost  would  do 
it),  showing  what  the  moral  experi- 
ments of  the  trusts  have  been  and  how 
170 


underwitted  it  is  to  take  all  the  money  On  Being 
one  can  get.  We  have  always  known  that 
it  ought  to  be  underwitted,  but  we  have 
been  wanting  to  have  it  proved  and 
built  into  the  world.  We  could 
not  be  optimistic  about  having  a  new 
ethics  —  or  what  many  people  seem  to 
think  is  a  new  ethics — adopted  by  a  whole 
world,  if  it  were  just  a  little  thing  of  our 
own,  an  idea  we  had  worked  up  by  our- 
selves or  that  some  good,  kind  gentleman 
somewhere  had  just  thought  of.  But  it 
is  in  the  nature  and  momentum  of  things. 
In  an  age  when  one  can  look  out,  almost 
any  day,  and  watch  people,  the  more 
prominent,  superior  people,  being  fairly 
pushed  or  jostled  over  into  goodness,  it 
does  not  seem  (as  it  has  lately)  merely 
weak-minded  and  hopeful  to  be  good,  or 
to  keep  on  believing  in  it. 

There  is  no  denying  that  if  a  manufac- 
turer wants  to  do  wrong  he  can  do  it  in  a 
small  way  by  picking  carefully  out  of  a 
whole  world,  people  he  can  cheat  here  and 
271 


inspired  there,  but  if  he  wants  to  do  a  big  business 
—  a  big  characteristic  modern  business,  a 
business  in  which  he  will  have  to  cheat 
everybody —  he  will  sooner  or  later  —  it  is 
merely  a  matter  of  experiment  —  be  good 
and  practical.  The  larger  advertisers 
have  already  found  —  most  of  them  — 
that  the  more  they  advertise  the  more  hon- 
est they  have  to  get.  It  is  everybody's 
affair  when  one  does  wrong  to  a  planet. 
One  man  or  a  single  newspaper  can  stop 
it,  or  a  novelist  who  spends  six  weeks  in 
Chicago.  One  single  thorough-minded, 
honest  woman,  with  a  fountain  pen,  can 
touch  off  the  world  like  a  bomb,  and 
bring  down  the  weight  of  a  whole  nation 
upon  a  man  with  a  can  of  kerosene  in 
Cleveland.  "  The  way  of  the  transgres- 
sor is  hard  "  in  a  world  with  the  printing 
press  and  with  the  electric  light  in  it,  and 
Ida  Tarbell.  "  The  way  of  the  transgres- 
sor is  hard "  instead  of  being  an  old, 
worthy,  and  rather  helpless  remark 
tucked  safely  away  in  a  bible,  is  being 

17* 


writ  large  across  the  world.     It  is  seen  in  On  Being 
shop  windows  now  as  well  as  in  Sunday  to°D0  Wrong 
Schools,  and  is  attracting  attention. 

It  is  not  strictly  true,  perhaps,  that  we 
are  going  to  have  a  new  ethics  to  go  with 
the  new  unity  of  the  world.  But  it  is 
going  to  look  like  a  new  ethics  and  seem 
for  a  time  to  many  people  like  an  exact  con- 
tradiction of  what  we  have.  When  business 
houses  were  small  and  were  all  tucked  away 
into  separate  nations  or  pigeon-holes  on  the 
planet,  many  wrong  things  were  practical, 
or  at  least  practical-looking,  that  are  not 
practical  now.  Modern  thought  and  mod- 
ern machinery  have  torn  nearly  all  of  our 
little  pigeon-hole  nations  down.  Every  na- 
tion is  penetrated  in  business  with  every 
other  nation.  The  empires  are  all  being 
j  umbled  together  into  buying  their  kerosene 
at  the  same  place.  The  nations  stand  and 
gossip  on  the  corner,  and  there  are  no  con- 
veniences now  for  being  mean  privately. 
Business  houses  that  are  too  big  to  find 
room  on  the  world  to  do  wrong  in,  do  right. 

273 


inspired  This  fact  of  being  so  crowded  that  there 

Millionaires  •  •,  i  •  i          •  in 

is  no  place  to  hide,  is  merely  of 
itself  bringing  to  pass  what  would  look 
like  a  new  ethics.  The  ordinary  old- 
fashioned  business  principle  of  getting 
all  one  can,  did  well  enough,  perhaps, 
when  applied  to  a  butcher  business  in  a 
village.  But  let  the  same  principle  be 
applied  to  the  feeding  of  a  whole  world, 
to  the  Armour  Packing  Co.,  for  instance, 
and  everybody  sees  that  there  is  some- 
thing the  matter  with  it.  When  the 
Armour  Packing  Co.  remarks  to  a  hungry 
planet,  politely  but  firmly,  "  Business  is 
business  "  (a  thing  they  have  always  be- 
lieved before),  nobody  believes  it.  The 
very  governments  of  the  world  (the  slow- 
est of  all)  have  stopped  believing  it.  It 
was  always  a  lie  even  in  a  small  village 
butcher  business,  but  the  lie  was  on  such  a 
small  scale  that  only  a  few  people  here 
and  there  noticed  it.  If  the  great  mass 
of  people  are  to  be  convinced  of  a  spir- 
itual truth  it  takes  a  man  like  John  D. 

»74 


Rockefeller  to  do  it.  This  is  why  the  On  Being 
situation  is  so  encouraging.  Mr.  Rocke-  to°D0  Wrong 
feller  and  Mr.  Armour  and  Mr.  Harri- 
man  are  doing  us  so  much  good.  Every- 
body prefers  the  truth,  and  it  is  merely  a 
matter  of  getting  the  truth  put  in  enough 
dollars  —  and  enough  of  their  own  dollars 
— for  people  to  see  it.  This  seems  to  be  what 
the  trusts  are  for — getting  the  truth  big 
enough — taking  just  any  ordinary  truth 
from  out  of  the  New  Testament  and  mak- 
ing it  so  big  almost  anybody  could  see  it. 
One  at  a  time,  the  trusts  are  cornering 
lies.  They  are  putting  the  devil  where 
he  cannot  help  himself.  In  religion,  of 
course,  and,  perhaps,  in  education  and  in 
the  arts,  there  will  be  some  important 
things  left  to  the  devil ;  but  in  business,  in 
the  grosser  forms  of  business,  at  least, 
where  people  care  so  much  and  think  so 
hard  and  have  Mr.  Rockefeller  and  Pres- 
ident Baer  to  help,  they  are  going  to  see 
through  him.  He  will  have  to  move  on. 


275 


XII 

The  Next  Corner  of  the  World 

FIFTEEN  years  ago  one  could 
hardly  have  found  a  government  in 
the  civilized  world,  which  when  it  had 
something  to  say  to  another  government, 
did  not  suppose  it  would  not  have  to  tell 
the  truth  very  economically.  Individual 
men  when  they  were  dealing  with  one 
another  told  the  truth,  fifteen  years  ago, 
but  nations  were  too  big.  About  this 
time  John  Hay,  a  poet  and  a  gentleman 
from  Cleveland,  Ohio  —  a  sort  of  spirit- 
ual step-son  of  Abraham  Lincoln  —  was 
made  Secretary  of  State  by  William 
McKinley,  and  it  came  over  Mr.  Hay, 
after  not  very  many  weeks,  that  being 
Secretary  of  State  would  be  really  a  much 
pleasanter  position  if  one  did  not  have  to 
be  so  economical  with  the  truth  in  it.  It 
took  away  the  breath  of  Europe  almost  at 


first  to  have  a  novice  from  America,  a  The  Next 
comparatively  new  diplomat  come  trip- 
ping  into  the  grave  two  thousand  years  of 
diplomacy,  and  in  that  quiet,  natural 
western  way  begin  telling  the  truth  right 
and  left  among  the  great  governments  of 
the  world.  But  they  noticed  that  Mr. 
Hay  did  things  and  they  became  thought- 
ful. 

There  is  a  rumor  going  the  rounds  now 
that  since  John  Hay  has  shown  how  easy 
it  was  to  be  a  Secretary  of  State  and  say 
what  one  really  thought,  the  whole  face  of 
diplomacy  —  the  atmosphere  of  foreign 
legations  the  world  around  has  been 
changed.  Lying,  except  among  the 
smaller  and  weaker  nations,  in  dealing 
with  the  other  smaller  and  weaker  nations 
is  not  considered  practical  nor  quite  busi- 
nesslike and  up-to-date. 

Eight  years  ago  the  regular  politicians 
of  this  country  rose  up  en  masse  almost  to 
a  man,  and  told  us  that  Theodore  Roose- 
velt would  never  do  as  the  leader  of  the 


inspired       Republican  party,  and  that  he  was  not 

Millionaires  , .      ,     . ,      .  ,  , .  .,          ,„ 

practical,  that  he  was  too  candid  and  free 
with  people,  that  he  was  not  politic 
enough  to  be  a  President  of  the 
United  States.  To-day  these  same  men 
are  finding  fault  with  Mr.  Roosevelt 
because  they  were  mistaken  about 
him  and  because,  by  being  open  with 
the  people  and  by  not  being  politic- 
looking,  he  can  do  with  the  people 
almost  anything  he  likes,  and  is  the 
biggest  politician  of  us  all.  The  people 
seem  to  have  been  convinced,  even  the 
politicians  have  been  —  that  a  President  of 
the  United  States  does  not  need  to  be 
somebody  else  to  succeed,  and  can  quite 
resemble  himself,  if  he  likes.  And  now 
that  it  has  been  proved,  that  a  public  man's 
being  himself  in  America  is  good  poli- 
tics, thousands  of  little  Roosevelts  are 
springing  up  all  over  the  country,  men 
who  are  like  Roosevelt  and  have  always 
had  it  in  them,  but  had  never  let  anybody 
know  it.  The  very  ward  politicians, 


many  of  them,  are  being  built  to-day  on  The  Next 
Roosevelt  lines.  oftheVorid 

Entirely  aside  from  approval  or  dis- 
approval of  his  policies  no  one  would 
probably  deny  that  whether  it  be  for  bet- 
ter or  worse  or  richer  or  poorer,  such  an 
arrangement  or  invention  as  Theodore 
Roosevelt  as  a  President  of  the  United 
States  would  not  have  been  thought  pos- 
sible ten  years  ago. 

Two  years  ago,  people  were  saying  of 
Charles  E.  Hughes  that  he  never  would 
really  do  for  a  governor.  He  was  all  very 
well,  but  he  could  not  get  things  done,  and 
he  could  not  dicker  with  the  regular  poli- 
ticians enough  to  put  things  through. 
And  it  looked  as  if  they  were  right,  and 
as  if  the  governor  were  what  they  sup- 
posed at  first.  For  weeks,  day  after  day, 
in  the  capitol  at  Albany  the  supposed  exec- 
utive was  seen  sitting  in  the  supposed  ex- 
ecutive chair  (the  supposed  icicles  dripping 
from  it)  in  a  supposed  attitude  of  mixed 
moral  grandeur  and  helplessness,  and 

»79 


inspired  gibes  and  threats  were  thrown  at  him  by 
s  the  wily  and  the  worldly  legislators  return- 
ing to  their  homes. 

And  what  did  the  whipped-looking  gov- 
ernor, with  all  his  threats  and  dares  heaped 
up  upon  him  and  upon  his  icicles,  do? 

He  did  one  of  the  most  memorable  and 
enlightened  silences  that  has  ever  been 
done  by  any  man  in  the  United  States. 
And  suddenly  it  was  as  if  in  that  silence 
one  could  hear  a  whole  State  being  taken 
up  bodily  and  moved  over  —  moved  over 
calmly  and  quietly  —  by  one  man  simply 
by  that  one  man's  being  right.  It  was 
one  of  the  biggest,  stillest,  most  uncon- 
scious acts  of  pure  energy  that  this  coun- 
try has  ever  seen.  It  came  like  a 
revelation  —  almost  like  an  apocalypse  — 
in  our  national  politics,  of  how  a  single  and 
simple  natural  man  merely  by  being  right, 
and  being  right  in  a  plain,  two-plus- 
two-equals-four  way,  could  make  six  mil- 
lion people,  a  whole  statef  ul  of  people,  all 
sitting  quietly  in  their  homes,  step  out  and 
280 


do  things.  The  politicians  were  all  kindly  The  Next 
but  firmly  sent  back  to  the  Legislature,  of  theVorid 
the  humble  servants  of  a  governor  of  the 
people  who  without  lifting  his  hand  or 
without  saying  a  word  apparently  could 
make  politicians  do  right.  It  was  like 
one  of  the  great,  quiet  acts  of  nature. 
Who  would  have  thought  three  years  ago 
it  would  be  practical  in  American  politics 
just  to  be  still  and  be  right?  But  now 
that  righteousness  and  silence  judiciously 
mixed  have  been  tried  in  a  great  State 
like  New  York,  and  where  everyone  could 
see,  the  whole  face  of  national  politics  has 
changed.  People  have  learned  that  a 
silence  by  Charles  E.  Hughes  in  this 
country  is  so  practical  that  it  is  going  to 
be  hard  to  keep  him  many  years,  from 
being  a  President  of  the  United  States. 
All  that  was  necessary  was  to  give  a 
sample  silence  to  the  country  at  large  and 
prove  that  the  thing  could  be  done  and 
now  in  two  or  three  years,  thousands  of 
these  little  Hughes 's  silences  will  be  seen 
281  t 


inspired  springing  up  all  over  this  country, 
:s  and  thousands  of  the  little  Hughes's 
silences  and  thousands  of  the  little 
talking  Roosevelts  will  be  seen  going 
on  side  by  side  from  Maine  to  California. 
Mr.  Roosevelt  and  Mr.  Hughes,  both  vital 
and  unlike,  have  released  and  set  in  ac- 
tion all  the  men  who  are  like  them  in  the 
United  States.  The  people  have  always 
wanted  men  like  these  —  now  and  then 
one  like  Lincoln  has  broken  through  in 
public  life,  men  of  courage  and  indi- 
viduality, and  who  incorrigibly  resemble 
themselves,  but  the  experiment  had  not 
been  tried  where  everybody  could  see  it  for 
some  time,  and  men  like  these  had  been 
keeping  out  of  politics  for  years.  It  was 
supposed  if  you  wanted  to  make  the  most 
of  yourself  in  politics  in  this  country,  the 
people  would  want  you  to  look  as  much 
like  somebody  else  as  you  could.  And 
now  the  entire  political  atmosphere  of  the 
country  has  been  cleared  and  politics  is 
full  of  zest  and  ozone  again  and  looks 
like  a  place  for  doing  things. 
282 


People  are  right  only  in  a  minor  sense  The  Next 
when  they  say,  as  they  almost  always  do, 
that  in  this  old  world  we  may  expect  new 
things  now  and  then,  if  we  must,  but  we 
must  not  expect  new  human  nature,  and 
that  Man  only  never  changes. 

There  is  not  a  man  on  the  whole  planet, 
nor  has  there  been  one  for  hundreds  of 
years,  who  has  not  been  a  different  man 
all  over  in  his  ideas  and  personality  and 
in  the  motives  of  his  life  because  of  Co- 
pernicus, or  who  does  not  see  himself  and 
the  little,  comical,  out-of-the-way  planet 
he  is  on,  in  an  opposite  light.  Let  men  be 
confronted  with  one  great  new  fact,  some 
sudden  turn  of  science,  some  great  new 
corner  of  the  world,  like  Copernicus,  and 
we  can  almost  stand  by  and  see  human 
nature  changing  before  our  eyes.  Pre- 
cisely the  same  people  may  suddenly  be 
seen  almost  any  time  doing  precisely  op- 
posite things.  They  come  to  the  next 
corner  of  the  world  and  stand  a  minute 
and  look.  That  is  all  that  happens. 


inspired  Probably  there  is  a  man  this  very  minute, 
8  somewhere  in  the  world  (in  the  tropics), 
who  is  thinking  that  he  knows  all  about 
water,  that  water  is  wet,  and  that  it  is 
warm,  and  that  it  flows,  and  if  he  were 
told  that  all  the  while,  at  the  very  time  that 
he  was  thinking  about  it,  dried,  cold  rain 
in  chunks  was  being  carried  from  house 
to  house  and  peddled  about  in  wagons,  he 
would  not  believe  it.  And  yet  it  is  all 
done  easily  enough.  Precisely  opposite 
things  are  true  in  the  same  half  inch  on  a 
thermometer.  What  people  will  do  at 
one  temperature  of  public  opinion  does 
not  show  what  they  will  do  at  another. 
Over  and  over  again  in  history  something 
will  seem  almost  impossible  or  like  a  revo- 
lution in  morals  and  there  will  come  a  rise 
of  temperature  in  public  opinion,  and  all 
is  changed  with  a  look.  Our  very  air- 
castles  turn  suddenly  solid  and  things  in 
the  sky  men  have  looked  on  for  years, 
they  walk  up  and  down  on  calmly.  They 
go  about  cutting  water  with  axes  or  run- 
284 


ning  railroad  trains  with  a  shut-up  cloud  The  Next 
as    if    nothing    had    happened.      These  Of  [^ 
things  are  nothing  to  us  and  human  na- 
ture boils,  freezes,  and  evaporates  with 
new  facts  and  the  moral  nature  of  man  is 
a  live  thing  and  it  becomes  solid,  liquid,  or 
iron,  or  like  water  or  cloud,  according  to 
the  last  new  facts  and  according  to  what 
we  saw  when  we  turned  the  last  corner  of 
the  world. 

This  is  the  way  evolution  affected  us, 
many  of  us,  within  our  memories.  It 
turned  our  whole  world  over  in  a  minute. 
Some  of  us  who  had  been  wondering 
about  the  world,  and  wondering  vaguely 
and  unconsciously  all  the  time  why  it  had 
not  been  turned  over  before,  were  glad, 
and  those  who  were  not  good  evolution- 
swimmers,  were  sorry,  but  the  fact  re- 
mains, whether  people  liked  it  or  not,  that 
the  world  had  been  turned  over  by  Dar- 
win and  an  earth-worm  and  was  warming 
a  whole  new  side  of  itself,  and  that 
nothing  in  a  man's  brain  will  ever  be  done, 

*S5 


inspired       or  ever  be  thought,  since  evolution  has 

Millionaires   ,  ,.  , 

been  discovered,  in  quite  the  same  way. 
New  styles  and  new  geologies  are  sweep- 
ing past  his  consciousness  —  past  all  his 
little,  old,  funny,  pompous,  hemmed-in 
thoughts,  and  the  very  structure  of  his 
brain  is  changed.  Infinity  flowing  out 
of  the  infinite  and  on  to  the  infinite  across 
the  little  cells  in  his  skull  is  making  him  a 
new  creature.  Evolution,  which  is  the 
last  great  corner  of  the  world,  has  created 
in  most  of  us  whole  new  sets  of  motives 
and  emotions  and  has  cut  away  our  old 
ones.  It  has  brought  us  face  to  face 
suddenly  with  this  great  new  stretch  of 
the  souls  of  men. 

"  Then  felt  I  like  some  watcher  of  the  skies 
When  a  new  planet  swims  into  his  ken; 

Or  like  stout  Cortez,  when  with  eagle  eyes 
He  stared  at  the  Pacific  —  and  all  his  men 

Looked  at  each  other  with  a  wild  surmise  — 
Silent,  upon  a  peak  in  Darien." 

In  the  same  way  a  new  ethics  in  busi- 
ness, or  what  will  look  like  it,  is  bein£ 
brought  to  pass  by  the  changes  in  our 

286 


physical  ideas  of  the  earth  and  of  the  The  Next 
furnishings  and  conveniences  of  the  little 
strip  of  atmosphere  around  it.  The  mod- 
ern ideas  about  dust  and  germs  are  revo- 
lutionizing men's  conduct  toward  one  an- 
other. The  germs  are  at  work  day  and 
night,  millions  of  them  to  a  cubic  inch, 
socializing  us.  They  are  making  men 
respect  each  other  and  notice  each 
other.  They  are  making  men  care 
about  one  another's  very  breathing  in 
the  streets.  Who  would  have  thought 
fifteen  years  ago  that  one  would  come  on 
a  sign  like  this  in  a  car  in  New  York? 

SPITTING    ON    THE    FLOOR    OF    THIS    CAR    IS 
A    MISDEMEANOR 

FIVE  HUNDRED  DOLLARS  FINE 

OR  IMPRISONMENT  FOR  ONE  YEAR 

OR  BOTH 

MAY    BE    THE    PUNISHMENT   THEREFOR 

No  one  would  have  believed,  who  had 
declared  when  Dickens  was  in  America  in 
'42,  that  the  time  would  come  in  this  coun- 
try before  many  years,  when  a  man  could 


inspired  be  charged,  or  informed  seriously  that  he 
!S  might  be  charged,  five  hundred  dollars  for 
spitting  in  the  streets.  And  yet  this  is 
merely  one  instance  of  the  way  that  all 
scientific  discoveries  to-day  are  bring- 
ing men  closer  together  and  putting  their 
conduct  on  a  closer  and  more  mutual  and 
ethical  basis.  In  a  world  where  science 
has  made  even  another  man's  breathing  a 
personal  matter,  the  way  another  man 
does  his  business  becomes  a  personal  mat- 
ter. Religion  and  poetry  for  thousands 
of  years  have  tried  to  make  men  intimate 
enough  to  understand,  and  now  science 
is  making  men  intimate  enough  to 
be  good.  A  telephone  on  a  man's  desk 
puts  a  whole  continent  in  the  next  room, 
and  he  begins  to  act  as  if  it  were  there. 
The  very  structure  of  his  brain  is  changed 
by  it.  His  sins  and  his  virtues  come  back 
in  a  minute  and  in  whatever  he  does,  he  is 
immeasurably  aware  of  others.  Rail- 
roads, telephones,  wireless  telegraphs, 
and  great  cities  are  making  new  human 
288 


beings,  and  new  incredibly  socialized  men  The  Next 
out  of  all  of  us,  and  the  lonely  each-on- 
your-own-hill  morals  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, when  we  have  had  a  hundred  years 
of  telephones,  will  look  palezoic.  Christ 
and  St.  Paul  converted  a  few  thousand 
individuals  in  each  generation  out  of  mil- 
lions of  so-called  Christians.  Railroads, 
gas-bills,  and  coal  trusts,  and  telephones 
are  going  to  convert  us  all. 

No  one  would  have  imagined  sixty 
years  ago,  when  people  were  giving  up 
stage  coaches  for  railroads,  how  religious 
railroads  were.  People  are  being  crowded 
in  such  close  quarters  that  they  have  to  be 
converted  to  stand  it.  The  rich  and  the 
poor,  and  the  good  and  the  bad,  and  the 
weak  and  the  strong,  can  no  longer  be 
kept  carefully  sorted  out  by  themselves, 
and  when  men  do  right  or  wrong  to-day 
it  is  no  longer  their  own  affair.  The 
germ  theory  or  policy  has  precipitated 
upon  men  an  entirely  new  conduct  of  hu- 
man affairs.  Kodaks,  moving  pictures, 
289 


inspired      Public  Utilities  Commissions  follow  our 

Millionaires  f  ^ 


ing  separate  interests.  Mosquitoes  and 
reporters  vie  with  each  other  in  inoculat- 
ing everybody  with  everybody  else. 
Every  man's  business  is  every  other  man's 
business.  Germs,  tuberculosis,  the  gypsy 
moth,  canned  meats,  railroads,  and  tele- 
phones and  all  the  other  terrifically  inti- 
mate things  work  day  and  night  jostling 
the  world  together  to  be  good.  There  is 
no  known  way  in  the  modern  world  for 
men  to  be  strictly  selfish  or  strictly  in  a 
class  by  themselves.  A  sick  rat  in  San 
Francisco  startles  the  whole  United 
States  and  New  York  builds  the  sewers  of 
Havana.  We  care  if  they  have  the  bu- 
bonic plague  in  India  and  if  they  adulter- 
ate drugs  in  China,  and  when  the  Penn- 
sylvania Railroad  wants  to  reduce  the 
wages  of  its  employees  it  begins  by  cut- 
ting the  salaries  of  the  president  and  the 
directors  and  of  the  men  at  the  top.  The 
old,  neat,  safe,  pleasant,  and  comfortable 


moral  compartments  the  world  was  di-  The  Next 
vided  into,  twenty  years  ago,  have  been 
broken  down.  Bacteria,  influenza,  mail- 
orders, country  trolleys,  and  rural  deliv- 
eries, and  newspapers,  and  socialist-mil- 
lionaires championing  the  cause  of  the 
poor,  street  railway  magnates  and  Tom  L. 
Johnsons  fighting  for  the  rights  of  the 
people,  have  jumbled  the  world  together 
and  Fifth  Avenue  and  the  Bow- 
ery may  be  seen  at  last  trooping 
daily  through  each  other,  and  the  rail- 
way presidents  and  brakemen  are  arm 
in  arm.  The  old  conventional  business 
ethics  of  getting  all  that  one  can  out 
of  everybody  looks  old-fashioned  in  a 
minute,  in  a  world  like  this,  a  world  so 
terribly  and  closely  arranged,  where  the 
chickens  come  home  to  roost,  where  germs 
and  rebates  and  tuberculosis  and  life  in- 
surance and  even  the  very  railroads  come 
home  to  roost.  The  new  business  ethics 
of  not  getting  all  that  one  can,  whether  or 
no,  and  of  conducting  a  bargain  so  that 
291 


inspired  all  concerned  will  be  glad  and  will  want  to 
come  back,  becomes  inevitable.  A  world 
where  if  one  wants  to  get  rich,  one  must 
do  it  by  dealing  with  the  same  people 
over  and  over  again,  invents  a  new  busi- 
ness man.  The  new  business  man  sees 
that  in  the  twentieth  century  jumping  on 
another  man's  toe  in  business,  is  merely  a 
more  round-about  way  of  jumping  on 
one's  own.  The  best  millionaire  has  al- 
ready reckoned  with  this.  He  does  not 
like  to  have  to  stand  by  and  see  a  fellow 
millionaire  getting  rich  by  ruining  the 
business  in  which  they  are  both  engaged. 
There  were  hundreds  of  millionaires  a 
few  years  ago  during  the  great  coal 
strike  who  saw  how  President  Baer  looked 
and  who  wished  they  could  control  him  a 
little,  and  could  make  him  look  more  in- 
telligent, and  more  aware  of  things.  They 
could  not  quite  bear  to  see  him  all  that 
long  winter,  morning  after  morning  as 
the  papers  appeared,  going  out  calmly 
day  after  day  in  the  sight  of  all  of  us 
292 


dumping  his  garbage  into  his  own  The  Next 
spring.  Rebates  and  suppressed  inven- 
tions,  hold-up  trusts,  monopolies  based  on 
position  rather  than  invention,  or  upon 
number  rather  than  merit  and  service,  fail 
to  work  in  a  world  as  intimate  and  as 
highly  organized  as  this  and  as  nervously 
endowed  with  telegraph  all  through, 
where  everything  that  happens  to  one  part 
of  the  body  of  society  is  flashed  through 
to  the  other  parts,  and  where  a  rich  man's 
panic  or  a  mere  poor  man's  hardship  is 
an  impossibility. 

A  few  winters  ago,  at  the  time  of  the 
great  public  hold-up  in  coal,  when  the 
whole  United  States  almost  had  to  go  to 
bed  to  keep  warm,  and  was  lying  there 
wondering  what  kind  of  a  man  President 
Baer  was,  and  what  he  could  be  thinking 
of  or  had  been  thinking  of  all  these  years, 
the  United  States  thought  the  whole  mat- 
ter out  and  invented  its  first  rough  sketch 
or  outline  of  the  new  millionaire.  Scores 
of  semi-inspired  millionaires  were  begun 


inspired       that  winter  and  one  or  two,  it  has  always 

Millionaires  ,  ,  -    „     . 

seemed  to  me,  young,  anonymous,  fully  in- 
spired millionaires  must  have  been  begun, 
too. 

And  yet  President  Baer  had  been  doing 
nothing  new,  that  winter.  He  had  been 
merely  proceeding  upon  the  old  common 
business  ethics  of  always  getting  all  one 
can.  It  was  not  that  he  was  merely  differ- 
ent from  what  he  ought  to  be,  but  that  he 
brought  the  difference  out  for  us  when  we 
were  chilled-through  and  thoughtful.  He 
was  merely  another  corner  of  the  world 
and  when  the  world  got  to  him  it  was 
not  pleased  with  the  way  he  made  human 
nature  in  business  look.  It  was  not  merely 
that  President  Baer  was  hard  and  blind 
as  he  stood  there  all  that  winter  and 
seemed  to  us,  as  a  typical  business  man,  a 
little  underwitted.  He  made  us  begin  to 
suspect  our  whole  business  ethics.  Per- 
haps he  had  not  been  after  all  more  under- 
witted in  proportion  than  the  rest  of  us. 
He  had  merely  put  more  capital  into  it. 
494 


We  began   quite   generally  to   conceive  The  Next 

slowly,  as  we  thought  about  these  things  Ofthe  World 

out  in  the  cold,  a  new  and  different  type 

of  business  man,  the  type  of  business  man 

that  would  not  have  to  be  apologized  for  by 

always  saying  what  a  fine  personality  he 

was  in  private  life.    The  coal  strike  caught 

us  hoping  and  wondering,  and  making  up 

our  minds  about  business.    We  made  up 

our  minds  that  business  should  not  be  any 

longer  a  specially  marked-off  barbarian 

country,    a    fighting-place    or    cock-pit 

where  a  man  can  go  out  and  crowd  and 

bully  and  strike  below  the  belt  and  steal 

for  his  family,  and  then  come  back  into 

the  house  and  put  on  his  coat  and  coo  to 

the  baby  and  be  a  beautiful  character  until 

ten  the  next  morning. 

Since  the  coal  strike,  we  have  been  con- 
fronted with  new  facts.  We  have  turned 
the  next  corner  of  the  world. 

Nothing  is  more  wildly  romantic  or 
sentimental  than  despair  or  than  being 


inspired       discouraged  about  the  world  and  judging 

Millionaires       v     L    •  •  i  11  •, 

what  is  going  to  be  merely  by  what  is. 
In  a  world  where  new  inventions  are  giv- 
ing new  powers,  new  areas  of  insight  and 
fields  of  action  at  every  turn  it  is  not  prac- 
tical not  to  calculate  on  new  and  opposite 
things  in  men,  and  it  is  not  hard-headed 
not  to  have  visions  of  what  men  will  be 
like.  We  are  already  beginning  to  see 
that  there  are  going  to  be  such  things  as 
sky-scraper  rights  to  consider  soon  and 
automobile  laws  of  the  road,  that  there 
is  going  to  be  such  a  thing  as  balloon  terri- 
tory, with  ethical,  legal  problems.  How 
many  miles  high  can  a  man  own  air  above 
his  own  real  estate?  All  the  new  inven- 
tions are  introducing  about  us  new  ethical 
considerations  and  all  the  new  scientific 
relations  of  the  world  are  being  followed 
by  new  moral  relations.  The  impossibili- 
ties become  the  platitudes  when  men  have 
turned  another  corner  of  the  world.  Peo- 
ple would  have  said  once  that  bicycles 
were  impossible.  People  would  have 

^96 


said  two  years  ago  that  a  rail-  The  Next 
way  train  balanced  high  up  on  a  single 
rail  and  running  like  a  bicycle  on  a  tight- 
rope, at  no  one  knows  how  many  miles 
an  hour,  would  be  absurd,  and  the  same 
people  are  saying  that  an  inspired  mil- 
lionaire, a  millionaire  who  happened  to 
enjoy  making  and  spending  his  money  in 
a  little  more  mutual,  permanent  way  than 
others  would  be  out  of  the  question. 

And  yet  when  the  idea  of  an  inspired 
millionaire  has  been  invented  and  per- 
fected and  one  has  been  finished  off  — 
or  one  or  two  —  they  will  be  introduced 
and  installed  like  electric  lights,  tele- 
phones, and  trollies  and  central  power 
houses  in  every  city  in  the  United  States. 
The  fact  seems  to  be  coming  out  all  about 
us  that  the  world  is  not  inventing  merely 
new  kinds  of  machines,  but,  with  Coperni- 
cus, Jesus,  Darwin,  Bell,  Lord  Kelvin, 
Rousseau,  Columbus,  Wordsworth,  Lin- 
coln, Whitman,  Emerson,  Edison,  and 
Marconi,  it  is  slowly  inventing  new  kinds 


inspired       and  new  sizes  of  men.     Out  of  all  these 

Millionaires   »  .     j  •.  n  ., 

kinds  and  sizes  of  men  there  will  be  one 
inspired  millionaire. 


I  was  talking  on  this  general  subject 
with  Brim  the  other  day  and  he  remarked 
that  I  must  try  not  to  be  too  hopeful. 
Brim  is  wise  in  the  wisdom  of  this  world. 

"  Why?  "  I  said. 

I  then  gathered  from  the  general  tenor 
of  Brim's  remarks  that  in  his  opinion  when 
a  man  sees  poetry  in  machinery  and  wants 
other  people  to,  he  ought  to  hold  in  a 
little  and  not  be  too  hopeful  about  it.  He 
intimated  that  it  would  not  do,  while  peo- 
ple were  going  by,  to  stand  mooning 
around  a  factory  looking  up  at  it  as  if  it 
were  a  sunset  or  an  aurora  borealis.  It  did 
not  do  any  good,  he  intimated;  and  in 
the  same  way,  when  a  man  sees  poetry  in 
business  or  almost  a  new  religion  in  being 
rich,  it  would  be  much  better  to  feel  one's 
way  on  it  carefully  and  not  expect  people 
to  hope  much. 


I  could  see  that  Brim  was  veering  The  Next 
slowly  around  to  what  I  had  just  been 
telling  him  was  in  this  book,  and  he  ad- 
mitted, finally,  that  for  all  practical  pur- 
poses —  at  least  according  to  my  own  ac- 
count of  it  —  I  had  written  a  very  dis- 
couraging book.  It  would  not  do,  he 
said.  It  antagonized  people  to  have  any- 
one expect  so  much.  The  very  title  I  had 
taken,  he  thought,  would  drive  people 
away.  I  confess  that  he  made  me  feel 
lonely  and  morbid  for  a  little,  while  he 
went  on.  There  was  no  getting  at  me 
after  all,  apparently,  I  thought,  I  was  in 
a  bottomless  pit  of  hope. 

I  asked  him  how  he  thought  it  would  do 
to  hope  just  as  much,  but,  perhaps  put  the 
hope  off  for  two  or  three  hundred  years. 

He  thought  it  would  help. 

I  asked  him  how  it  would  strike  him  if 
I  took  the  hope,  the  same  hope  that  is  in 
the  book,  not  changing  it  in  the  least,  and 
keeping  all  its  elements  in  it,  and  nar- 
rowed it  down  to  one  millionaire. 
499 


inspired  He  thought  it  would  help,  and  that  a 

Millionaires  r       i         -,11  •          •       -i        -IT          • 

book  with  but  one  inspired  millionaire  in 
it  might  do,  perhaps. 

A  little  memory  of  this  conversation  (I 
felt  during  it  a  little  the  way  Abraham 
did,  probably,  when  he  was  trying  to  nar- 
row down  God  as  to  how  few  people  he 
would  save  Sodom  for)  has  just  come  over 
me  while  I  am  in  this  last  chapter  and  am 
taking  my  last  chance  at  the  reader,  and 
perhaps  it  can  do  no  harm,  in  bringing  to  a 
close  what  I  have  had  to  say  about 
inspired  millionaires,  to  call  attention 
to  the  fact  that  I  have  not  given 
dates  in  this  book  or  lists  of  names.  One 
inspired  millionaire  is  all  that  this 
book  is  about  —  my  responsibility  stops 
with  him.  I  have  not  found  it  hard  to 
confine  myself  to  believing  in  one  inspired 
millionaire,  because  it  has  seemed  to  me 
that  one  inspired  millionaire  would  be 
enough. 

One  telephone  was  enough. 


3oo 


Epilogue 


WE  HAVE  come  to  the  parting  of 
the  ways.  We  are  about  to 
choose  between  the  socialized  millionaire 
and  socialism. 

We  must  either  believe  that  human  na- 
ture is  a  success  or  is  yet  a  possible  success, 
that  it  is  possible  to  evolve  out  of  what  we 
have  a  man  who  is  great  enough  to  be  rich 
—  a  socialized  millionaire  —  or  we  must 
believe  that  human  nature  is  a  failure  and 
that  it  is  going  to  be,  and  that  the  best 
that  can  be  done  with  it  now,  is  to  fall 
back  on  socialism. 

The  human  race  is  gathering  itself  to- 
gether for  a  last  great  struggle  around 
the  world,  to  respect  itself. 

The  better  and  more  obvious  aims  and 

criticisms  of  the  socialists  belong  to  all  of 

us,  and  our  quarrel  with  socialism  is  with 

socialism  as  a  means.     We  do  not  believe 

301 


inspired  in  curing  the  evils  of  society  by  emascula- 
8  tion.  It  has  seemed  to  us  that  socialism  is 
born  of  despair  and  infidelity,  and  of  the 
mere  natural  first  failures  of  human  na- 
ture in  dealing  with  the  great  new  ex- 
periments like  trusts  and  railroads  and 
with  the  new  sudden  unity  of  the  world. 
It  has  seemed  to  us  that  socialism  has  been 
based  upon  an  ignoble  and  temporary  and 
one-sided  interpretation  of  human  nature, 
and  that  America  has  come  to  the  point 
where  we  must  choose  which  interpreta- 
tion we  shall  now  believe.  Shall  we  believe 
in  natural  selection,  in  freedom,  and  man- 
hood, in  the  voluntary  service,  and  the 
nobility  of  men;  or  shall  we  believe  that 
men  have  failed,  that  it  must  be  accepted 
as  a  truth  that  men  are  vulgar  and  mean 
in  their  motives,  and  that  their  righteous- 
ness must  be  the  righteousness  of  slaves, 
that  they  must  be  emasculated,  their  power 
to  do  wrong  taken  away  from  them, 
and  must  be  managed  like  automatons  by 
society  or  by  a  machine  from  the  outside? 


It  has  seemed  to  us  that  what  the  Epilogue 
American  people  is  really  believing  to-day 
is  not  socialism,  a  tired,  discouraged  im- 
portation from  an  older  world,  but  that  it 
is  ready  to  believe  that  men  may  be  de- 
liberately true  and  enviable  and  generous, 
and  that  society  may  be  based  from  the 
bottom  to  the  top  on  the  capability  of  men 
for  noble,  voluntary,  individual  social  de- 
velopment. We  have  believed  in  America 
that  a  noble  individualism  can  produce  a 
noble  society.  This  is  our  American  vis- 
ion. And  in  spite  of  all  the  noble-hearted 
men  among  the  ranks  of  the  socialists  it 
has  seemed  to  us  that  socialism  is  a 
momentary  failure  of  the  modern  imagi- 
nation, the  imagination  to  see  the  real 
facts  about  us  as  they  are,  and  in  their 
larger  and  more  noble  and  permanent  rela- 
tions. This  supreme  act  of  imagination  upon 
our  modern  world  is  what  America  is  for. 

What  has  made  this  country  seem  great 
in  the  eyes  of  the  world  before  has  always 
been  its  imagination,  its  habit  of  bold  con- 
303 


inspired  ception,  of  boundless  initiative,  and  its 
*  visions  of  action  and  of  future  men  and  of 
future  events. 

What  has  made  this  country  seem  small, 
and,  for  so  great  a  country,  a  little  mean 
and  common  in  spirit  at  times,  has  been 
its  occasional  seizure  with  a  lack  of  imagi- 
nation. Where  there  is  no  vision  the  peo- 
ple perish. 

In  the  years  before  the  Civil  War  when 
we  failed  or  nearly  failed,  and  when  the 
nations  of  the  older  world  were  taunting 
us,  we  nearly  failed  because  we  broke 
with  our  national  genius  or  our  imagina- 
tion, our  power  of  shaping  and  welding 
unsettled  things  and  decided  like  the  older 
peoples,  that  perhaps,  after  all,  we  would 
better  fall  back  into  settled  ones.  We 
failed  or  nearly  failed  because  we  stopped 
working  on  the  world  with  our  imagina- 
tions and  abandoned  our  national  instinct, 
our  national  temperament,  our  native  air 
of  the  possible  or  of  the  future,  and  sud- 
denly, in  the  sight  of  all  the  older  peoples 
304 


of  the  earth,  did  not  dare  to  believe  more  Epilogue 
than  they  could. 

It  had  been  our  believing  more  than 
they  could  that  had  made  us  what  we  were. 
And  when  both  in  the  North  and  the  South 
our  leading  men,  both  in  public  and 
private,  stopped  believing  and  tried 
patching  and  compromising  instead, 
and  when  most  of  us  in  the  North 
and  the  South  were  living  our  lives 
and  arranging  our  convictions  from 
hand  to  mouth  as  best  we  could,  now 
up  and  down  and  now  down  and  up,  from 
day  to  day  in  a  kind  of  see-saw  of  expedi- 
ency, we  were  taunted  by  half  the  earth. 
It  was  not  American  to  be  morally  diplo- 
matic. We  did  not  know  how  to  do  it.  They 
do  these  things  better  in  Paris,  or  among 
the  older,  more  wearily  experienced  peo- 
ples. With  their  moral  old  age  and  moral 
anodynes  they  can  make  at  least  an  ele- 
gant, becoming,  or  almost  graceful-look- 
ing thing  out  of  half -belief  or  half -action 
and  compromise. 

305 


inspired  But  we  are  young  —  a  kind  of  splendid 

*  child  nation  —  and  our  strength,  like  the 
strength  of  the  child,  and  like  the  strength 
of  the  West,  lies  in  our  seeing  the  truth 
and  doing  it  together.  It  is  particularly 
true  of  us,  "  Where  there  is  no  vision  the 
people  perish." 

It  has  been  because  we  imagined  more 
and  believed  harder  about  ourselves  than 
the  older  nations  that  we  have  led  the 
nations  of  the  earth,  and  that  in  these 
things  they  have  wanted  us  to.  They  have 
silently  given  the  future  into  our  hands 
and  have  called  it  our  territory.  They 
have  seen  that  out  of  all  of  them  it  belongs 
to  us  to  be  the  ones  that  should  lead  in  the 
things  of  the  future,  because  we  seemed  to 
believe  easily  and  naturally  where  they 
have  to  try,  and  because  we  track  out  the 
future  with  nonchalance.  In  the  things 
that  are  settled  the  older  nations  lead  us ; 
but  in  those  greater  things,  the  things  that 
are  still  unsettled,  the  ennobling  and  ful- 
filling of  the  daily  labor  of  the  common 


men  of  the  earth,  we  are  touched  with  a  Epilogue 
strength  that  is  not  our  own.  The 
strength  of  the  desires  and  the  postponed 
hopes  of  the  old  and  of  the  tired  nations 
is  upon  us.  We  are  strong  because  we  are 
the  spokesmen  of  the  prayers  of  a  world. 
America  is  not  a  theory  —  a  map  or  chart 
of  what  men  might  be.  America  is  a  vis- 
ion that  a  great  people  have  wrought  — 
out  of  wars  and  revolutions  they  have 
wrought  it  —  a  vision  of  free  voluntary 
men,  rich  and  poor,  in  a  new,  fresh  land, 
fulfilling  themselves  and  fulfilling  one 
another  together. 

The  real  vision  or  ideal  of  the  typical 
American  is  the  aristocrat.  He  has  come 
to  America  because  he  has  a  new  and  noble 
idea  of  what  an  aristocrat  is.  The  aristo- 
crat in  America  is  the  man  who  is  more 
of  a  democrat  than  other  people  have  the 
brains  to  be,  the  man  who  can  identify 
himself  with  the  interests  and  with  the 
points  of  view  of  the  most  kinds  of  people. 

The  man  who  is  the  working  vision  of 
307 


inspired  our  people,  who  is  most  regarded,  who  is 
almost  worshiped  in  America,  wherever  he 
emerges,  is  the  man  who  is  most  individual 
and  mutual,  who  stands  the  most  for  him- 
self, and  the  most  for  all  the  people. 

If  what  I  have  tried  to  put  in  this  book 
is  a  mere  theory  or  map  or  chart,  it  will 
not  live  and  reproduce  itself,  but  if  it  is  a 
vision,  if  it  is  the  live  actual  thing  itself  - 
merely  the  more  spiritual,  more  intangible 
body  with  which  it  comes  at  first,  I  have 
seen  that  it  shall  live  and  multiply,  that  a 
great  people  shall  rise  in  it  and  daily  dwell 
in  it,  that  they  shall  embody  it  in  them- 
selves and  imbed  it  in  the  world,  that  they 
shall  materialize  it  before  our  eyes.  Then 
it  shall  be  seen  by  all  of  us.  Then  slowly 
day  by  day,  and  man  by  man  —  the  cities 
and  the  fields  and  the  factories  lifting  to- 
gether, it  shall  come  to  pass. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE    SHADOW  CHRIST.      A  Study  of  the  Hebrew  Men 
of  Genius. 

THE  LOST  ART  OF  READING.    A  Sketch  of  Ch  ilization. 

THE  CHILD  AND  THE  BOOK.     A  Constructive  Criticism 
of  Education. 

ABOUT  AN  OLD  NEW  ENGLAND  CHURCH.    A  Picture 
of  the  Good  Old  Days. 

MOUNT  TOM.   An  All  Outdoors  Magazine.    Devoted  to  Rest 
and  Worship  and  to  A  Little  Look-off  On  The  World. 

ROUND  WORLD  SERIES: 

I  THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES.      An  Introduc- 
tion to  the  20th  Century. 

II  INSPIRED  MILLIONAIRES.   An  Introduction  to  the 
20th  Century. 

Ill  CROWDS.    (In  Preparation.)  An  Introduction  to  the 
20th  Century. 

(For  publishers  and  particulars  with  regard  to  the  above,  see 
following  pages.) 

THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES 

An  Introduction  to  the  20th  Century 
$1.25.      Mount  Tom  Press 

It  is  a  big  book.  Mr.  Lee  is  a  writer  of  great  power  of 
expression  and  of  singular  insight.  His  humor  is  gigantic,  and 
he  has  flashes  of  eloquence  that  not  a  dozen  living  men  can 
rival. —  The  New  York  Evening  Mail. 

Here  is  a  book  to  try  our  minds — to  see  whether  they  be  quick 
or  dead.  .  .  .  Lee  has  the  happiness,  and  the  unhappiness, 
of  being  a  man  who  thinks  with  his  senses,  and  feels  with  intelli- 
gence —  in  an  age  that  has,  in  the  main,  determined  to  keep  its 
head-business  separate  from  all  affairs  of  the  heart.  But  Lee's 
way  of  working  his  head  and  heart  in  one  circulatory  system  is 
the  way  of  nature  and  sound  physiology;  it  follows  that  he  is 
longer  for  this  world  than  most  of  his  contemporaries.  The  salt 


THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES 


of  the  earth  will  find  here  a  book  that  is  great — simply  great  — 
by  all  the  ultimate  tests  of  greatness.  That  is  to  say,  it  has  all 
the  qualities  of  a  human  character  that  is  exceptionally  and 
astonishingly  sane. —  Kansas  City  Star. 

Mr.  Lee's  writing  is  certainly  like  a  breath  of  fresh  air,  though 
sometimes  coming,  let  us  say,  straight  from  the  North  Pole.  It 
may  bite  us  or  sting  us  or  slap  us  in  the  face,  but  it  is  wonder- 
fully bracing.  It  pricks  our  conventional  bubbles  of  thought, 
quickens  our  blood,  and  makes  us  think.  It  is  not  too  much  to 
say  after  reading  a  description  of  the  passing  of  a  railroad  train, 
that  quite  takes  one's  breath  away,  that  the  locomotive  is  **  a 
kind  of  Zeit-Geist,  or  passing  of  the  spirit  of  the  age."—  The 
Christian  Register. 

"  Poetry,"  declared  Wordsworth  in  one  of  the  most  frequently 
quoted  prose  sentences  he  ever  wrote,  "is  the  breath  and  finer 
spirit  of  all  knowledge ;  it  is  the  impassioned  expression  which  is 
in  the  countenance  of  all  science."  .  .  .  Some  minstrel  may 
even  find  in  the  colossal  factories  of  this  great  town,  in  their 
giant  enginery,  their  vast  host  of  men  and  women  doing  useful 
toil,  their  wonderful  conversion  of  the  common  soils  and  ores  of 
earth  into  things  of  beauty  —  may  perceive  in  all  this  the  quality 
of  majesty.  Then  he  will  realize  with  Lowell  that  *' beauty 
underlies  each  form  of  use.  .  .  .  *'  Seldom,  if  ever,  has  this 
conception  been  developed  so  fully  and  with  such  power  to 
inspire  as  in  "The  Voice  of  the  Machines." — Newark  Evening 
News. 

It  is  one  of  the  striking  books  of  the  year,  and  in  a  very  differ- 
ent way  quite  equal  to  Mr.  Lee's  preceding  work,  **The  Lost 
Art  of  Reading,"  which  has  been  more  highly  praised  than 
almost  any  recent  American  volume  of  essays. —  The  Springfield 
Republican. 

Not  even  Emerson,  in  his  conjuring  up  of  the  poet  who  is  to  be, 
let  his  mind  fare  so  far  into  space  as  thus  does  Gerald  Stanley 
Lee  in  his  very  remarkable  book  "The  Voice  of  the  Machines." 
—  The  New  York  Evening  Mail. 

.  .  .  A  book  of  pretty  fancies.  .  .  .  — St.  Louis 
Globe  Democrat. 

.  .  .  At  times  it  would  seem  as  if  his  thoughts  bordered  on 
the  whimsical,  but  it  will  be  found  upon  consideration  that  this 
lies  rather  in  its  unusualness  of  view  than  in  any  special  quality 
of  style. — Brooklyn  Eagle. 


THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES 


.  .  .  It  is  difficult  to  leave  off  quoting  from  this  book.  It 
is  so  almost  beyond  comparison  beautiful,  in  this  generation. 
.  .  .  New  as  the  name  of  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  i^  to  the  public, 
one  dare  write  of  him  as  a  poet  like  few,  for  the  beauty  and 
power  that  are  greatest,  that  come  from  the  deeps  of  intellectual 
sincerity  and  human  sympathy.  .  .  .  How  should  one  de- 
scribe Mr.  Lee's  style  —  its  peculiar  dignity  and  strange  beauty, 
its  strength  and  originality  ?  It  is  a  style  like  no  other,  the  style 
of  the  intellectual  ascetic,  so  clear  of  all  ornament  that  it  might 
convey  an  impression  of  angularity,  were  not  its  exquisite  work- 
manship, the  polished  reserve,  the  clean,  straight,  fine  lines  of  the 
artist  who  is  master  of  his  tools,  evident  in  every  sentence.  There 
is  something  in  the  style  that  reminds  one  of  Carlyle,  Ruskin, 
Maeterlinck — these  are  almost  the  only  names  that  rise  for  com- 
parison in  the  memory  ;  and  yet  it  is  not  in  the  least  like  any  of 
them,  except  in  its  force  and  originality. — Los  Angeles  Times. 

Pungency  is  carried  too  far  in  Gerald  Stanley  Lee's  "  Voice  of 
the  Machines."  There  are  so  many  puzzles  in  the  world  that  we 
have  to  guess,  or  suffer  for  it,  that  it  is  a  pity  to  offer  us  puzzles 
that  we  don't  have  to  guess,  and  perhaps  have  no  time  to  ex- 
amine. What  are  Mr.  Lee's  "Machines?"  What  is  their 
"  Voice," — and  how  do  they  happen  to  have  a  voice  instead  of  a 
noise  ?  Shall  we  know  any  better,  or  live  any  better,  or  look 
any  better,  after  we  have  read  his  $1.25  book  through  ?  Such  is 
the  shorter  catechism  which  the  possible  reader  may  be  saying  to 
himself,  while  he  looks  so  polite  or  so  vacant.  Pepper  and  even 
horse-radish  are  good  condiments,  but  who  would  order  three 
meals  a  day  of  horse-radish,  or  pungent  parables  ?  Affidavits 
are  not  the  most  romantic  and  thrilling  reading ;  but  for  myself  I 
should  choose  a  volume  of  100  affidavits  rather  than  100  hypo- 
thetical questions.  I  wish  Mr.  Lee  would  construct  a  few  affi- 
davits,—  about  his  machines. — FRANK  SANBORN,  in  Boston  Liter- 
ary Letter  to  The  Springfield  Republican. 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  one  of  those  who,  like  McAndrew,  believe 
that  all  but  "damned  ijjits  "  see  poetry  in  machinery,  and  his 
"Voice  of  the  Machines"  is  a  long,  spasmodic  argument,  which 
practically  means  that  there  is  more  poetry  in  a  locomotive  than 
in  Shakespeare.  Most  of  this  kind  of  talk  is,  of  course,  mere 
nonsense,  resulting  from  a  failure  to  observe  distinctions.  .  .  . 
These  are  paragraphs  which  show  at  once  his  intellectual  confu- 


THE  VOICE  OF  THE  MACHINES 


sion  and  his  best  quality  of  picturesqueness.  .  .  .  The  Evening 
Post. 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee  is  a  name  that  has  been  known  for  long 
and  greatly  respected,  in  Europe  and  America,  by  all  those 
who  are  on  the  outlook  for  news  in  the  world  of  letters.  But  he 
belongs  by  natural  affinity  not  to  the  professional  bookmen,  but 
to  the  shop,  the  fireside,  and  the  open  road.  Hasten  the  day 
when  he  shall  come  unto  his  own !  — Kansas  City  Star. 

Mr.  Lee  has  insight  and  a  fresh  way  of  seeing  things,  and  he  is 
alive  with  the  inspiration  of  the  world  about  him.  In  this  latest 
book  he  is  making  it  his  business  to  reveal  to  us  the  meaning  and 
beauty  of  that  world,  and  no  one  can  read  the  book  through  with- 
out having  his  vision  cleared  and  his  heart  warmed.  It  is  tonic 
in  every  sentence,  and  it  is  not  the  less  so  for  the  presence  of  that 
vital  humor  that  bubbles  up  in  the  work  of  an  untrammeled  genius 
who  has  a  clear  eye  for  things  as  they  are.  —  Mail  and  Times. 

.  .  .  Gerald  Stanley  Lee,  of  the  Mount  Tom  Magazine,  is  a 
man  gifted  with  a  vision.  ...  —  The  Independent. 

But  whether  we  agree  with  Mr.  Lee  or  not,  we  want  right  here 
to  acclaim  him  the  most  stimulating  thinker  we  have  come  across 
in  many  a  day — and  that's  a  deal  better  than  agreeing  with 
everybody.  —  Springfield  Union. 

Mr.  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  has  written  a  book  with  a  great 
purpose,  to  wit,  to  prove  that — since  everything  in  our  modern 
age  is  bound  up  with  machinery — there  is  poetry  and  religion  in 
machinery,  a  beautiful  and  glorious  interpretation  of  it  for  our 
modern  life.  .  .  .  I  do  not  think  Mr.  Lee  is  right,  though  I 
wish  he  were.  But  at  least  he  is  as  eloquent  about  machinery  as 
the  author  of  Job  about  Leviathan,  and  it  is  impossible  not  to  ap- 
prove his  eloquence,  whatever  reservations  one  may  have  about 
his  philosophy.  —  Putnam's  Monthly. 

**  Can  a  machine  age  have  a  soul  ?"  This  is  the  question  which 
Gerald  Stanley  Lee  asks  in  his  latest  book,  and  answers,  with  all 
the  insight  plus  humor  which  people  have  come  to  expect  of  him. 
The  man  with  such  a  passion  for  both  machines  and  poetry  is  the 
man  to  make  others  understand  how  the  two  are  inseparable. 
.  .  .  His  is  the  spirit  of  youth  and  joy,  the  spirit  which  exhales 
faith  and  courage  —  and  which  wins.  To  read  him  is  like  reading 
"God's  in  his  heaven,  all's  right  with  the  world"  amplified  into 
vivid  prose. — Book  News. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE  SHADOW  CHRIST 

The  Century  Co.     ($1.25) 

"The  author's  name  —  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  —  has  been  hitherto  unknown 
to  us  in  England,  but  the  work  he  has  here  offered  to  the  world  indicates 
that  he  has  that  in  him  which  will  soon  make  it  familiar.  The  style  is 
the  author's  own,  shot  through  at  times  with  flashes  of  intensest  lightning, 
reminding  us  anon  of  Coleridge,  and  again  of  Shelley." —  The  Christian 
World  (London). 

"A  book  by  itself.  It  would  be  very  difficult  to  search  out  its  fore- 
castings  in  literary  or  theologic  writing.  It  is  a  free  writing,  quite  outside 
of  any  precedents,  and  to  be  judged  on  its  own  merits  intellectually  and 
emotionally.  As  a  literary  work,  this  book  places  Mr.  Lee  in  a  very  high 
rank  as  a  writer  of  imaginative  prose. —  Irresistible  current  of  thought. — 
It  is  more  than  attractive.  It  is  an  absorbing  book." —  The  Springfield 
Republican. 

"We  venture  to  say  that  no  more  powerful,  profound,  and  effective 
tribute  to  the  Jewish  faith  and  intellect  has  ever  come  from  a  Christian 
source  than  the  chapter  on  "The  Hagar  Nation."  The  author  is  incisive 
and  suggestive  in  an  extraordinary  degree.  He  is  fresh,  audacious,  even 
humorous,  yet  reverent  in  the  highest  sense.  Few  living  writers  could 
match  for  eloquence  and  force  the  pages  in  which  he  is  at  his  best." — 
The  Critic. 

"Let  me  be  one  of  the  first  to  recognize  in  this  book  what  every  man 
who  reads  it  thoughtfully  will  feel,  a  spirit  of  life  stirring  among  the  dry 
bones  of  biblical  criticism.  Heaps  of  the  books  that  have  been  written 
about  the  Bible  are  desiccated  to  the  last  grain  of  their  dust.  They  are 
the  desert  which  lies  around  Palestine.  Now  and  then  a  man  appears 
who  makes  his  way  straight  into  the  Promised  Land,  by  sea  if  necessary, 
and  takes  you  with  him." —  Dr.  Henry  van  Dyke,  in  The  Book  Buyer. 

"  One  might  pick  it  up  and  put  it  down  a  dozen  times  without  making 
anything  of  it,  but  let  a  page  be  fairly  mastered,  and  all  indifference  must 
give  way  to  delighted  interest  and  ever-deepening  fascination." —  Inde- 
pendent (London). 

"No  theologian  or  biblical  scholar  will  entirely  agree  with  Mr.  Stanley 
Lee.  But  he  compels  thought.  We  have  not  met  with  anyone  quite  like 
him  in  the  arrestive  quality  of  his  work.  One  of  the  most  extraordinary 
books  of  the  day." —  The  Recorder  (London). 

ABOUT  AN  OLD  NEW  ENGLAND 
CHURCH 

A  Sketch  of  Colonial  Days 
Mount  Tom  Press.     ($1.00) 

"I  have  read  it  twice  and  enjoyed  it  the  second  time  even  more  than 
the  first." —  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes. 

"Capital.  A  picture  as  faithful  as  it  is  lively." —  Charles  Dudley  Warner, 
"  I  read  the  preface  and  that  one  little  bite  out  of  the  crust  made  me  as 
hungry  as  a  man  on  a  railroad.  What  a  bright  evening  full  of  laughter, 
touched  every  now  and  then  with  tenderness,  it  made  for  us  I  do  not  know 
how  to  tell.  Here  is  a  book  I  am  glad  to  endorse  as  I  would  a  note  — 
right  across  the  face  and  present  it  for  payment  in  any  man's  library." — 
Robert  F.  Burdette. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE  CHILD  AND  THE  BOOK 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     ($1.25) 

"I  must  express  with  your  connivance  the  joy  I  have  had,  the  enthu- 
siasm I  have  felt,  in  gloating  over  every  page  of  what  I  believe  is  the  most 
brilliant  book  of  any  season  since  Carlyle's  and  Emerson's  pens  were  laid 
aside.  It  is  full  of  humor,  rich  in  style,  and  eccentric  in  form,  and  all  suf- 
fused with  the  perfervid  genius  of  a  man  who  is  not  merely  a  thinker  but  a 
force.  Every  sentence  is  tinglingly  alive 

"I  have  been  reading  with  wonder  and  laughter  and  with  loud  cheers. 
It  is  the  word  of  all  words  that  needed  to  be  spoken  just  now.  It  makes 
me  believe  that  after  all  we  haven't  a  great  kindergarten  about  us  in  author- 
ship, but  that  there  is  virtue,  race,  sap  in  us  yet.  I  can  conceive  that  the 
date  of  the  publication  of  this  book  may  well  be  the  date  of  the  moral  and 
intellectual  renaissance  for  which  we  have  long  been  scanning  the  horizon." 
—  Wm.  Sloane  Kennedy,  in  Boston  Transcript. 

THE  LOST  ART  OF  READING 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     ($1.25) 

"It  is  a  real  pleasure  to  chronicle  an  intellectual  treat  among  the  books 
of  the  day.  Some  of  us  will  shrug  at  this  volume.  Others  of  us,  having 
read  it,  will  keep  it  near  us." —  Life. 

"Mr.  Lee  is  a  writer  of  great  courage,  who  ventures  to  say  what  some 
people  are  a  little  alarmed  even  to  think." —  Springfield  Republican. 

"You  get  right  in  between  the  covers  and  live." —  Denver  Post. 

"Wherein  lies  the  power  and  charm  of  these  books?  It  is  in  the  fact 
that  they  are  abiding  books,  for  the  reader  will  turn  to  them  again  and 
again.  The  thoughts  in  them  will  widen  'with  the  process  of  the  suns' 
and  become  universal.  The  author  should  be  mentioned  with  Carlyle, 
Emerson,  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  and  Marcus  Aurelius,  who  have  known 
and  helped  hand  down  through  the  ages  that  real  literature  which  stands 
because  it  is  the  '  inward  voice  of  the  times '  speaking  to  all  people  for  all 
time. 

"  From  their  first  publication  these  books  have  been  recognized  as  classics 
on  reading;  they  are  to  be  unreservedly  commended  to  teachers  and  to 
parents  as  well." —  Atlantic  Education  Journal. 

MR.  GERALD  STANLEY  LEE  Introduces 

(To  The  Rockies,  and  The  Andes,  and  The  Mississippi  Valley,  and  to  all 
Hills,  Valleys,  and  Cities) 

MOUNT  TOM 

AN  ALL  OUTDOORS  MAGAZINE 

Devoted  to  Rest  and  Worship  and  to  a  Little  Look-off  on  the  World 

Edited  by  Mr.  Lee.     Every  other  Month.     Twelve  Numbers,  $1.00. 

Mount  Tom  Press,  Northampton,  Massachusetts. 

The  Magazine  is  in  the  form  of  personal  impressions  — mostly  those  of  the 
editor,  and  is  entirely  written  and  dated  from  the  Mountain.  It  is  supposed 
to  cultivate  those  varioua  friendly  but  distant  feelings  toward  the  world, 
and  toward  chimneys,  and  institutions,  that  a  mountain  gives  one  when  it 
has  the  chance. 


YB  05713 


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